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He woke up to find he was eighty-five, but that was impossible, because he was only seven, and he had just turned fifteen, and he was thirty-one, but also fifty-two. His parents were young, and his parents were middle-aged, and his parents were aging. He was at their funeral. That was so long ago. Sometimes…
A singular focus on the tension between you and me—more specifically, between where I end and you begin—binds the novella and fifteen fictions of Àngel Bonomini’s belated English-language debut, The Novices of Lerna. In these tales, egoists unsuccessfully confront their doppelgängers, maniacs attempt to stand out, and confident young denizens of Buenos Aires lose themselves…
Brooke Shaffner’s Country of Under tackles the social issues that shape identity and belonging. Immigration is the novel’s heartbeat, propelling its main characters, two misfit teens named Pilar and Río, into situations that ultimately help them to better understand themselves in relation to the immigration-related struggles that have shaped their lives. The teens have everything…
Reading a book about reading books is like entering a hall of mirrors: the experience is at once fascinating and disturbing. Like other stories about books and writing, The Book Censor’s Library drags the reader into itself, claiming to be one kind of book but unexpectedly (and imperceptibly) turning into another. Even the title throws…
To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the…
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, William Walsh writes about The Poets from Erratum Press. + Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified four kinds of readers: I am all four kinds of reader, and, I suppose, all four kinds…
How might a woman writer in Gilded-Age Boston break free from the authorial identity fashioned by her publisher and take control over not just her writing but her life? Virginia Pye’s The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is, at its core, a novel that centralizes women’s creative labor. Born Victoria Meeks and re-christened by her…