by Jude Cook | Mar 13, 2018 | Front page, Reviews
In the words of Laleh Khalili, whose essay on the Anti-Iraq War protest of 2003 ends this new anthology of protest writing from Comma Press, dissent often takes the form of a ‘joyous, raucous “no”’. This was the cry – voiced or unvoiced – of all those who demonstrated...
by Richard Bryant | Jan 31, 2018 | Reviews
Dystopias have never been more popular. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the appearance of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ there has been renewed interest in George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (aided by a well-received...
by William Braun | Jan 25, 2018 | Front page, Reviews
In Not a Place on Any Map, an experimental memoir published in 2016 by Vine Leaves Press, Alexis Paige recounts her life up to the present through a series of what might be termed, depending on whom you ask, prose vignettes, flash lyric essays, or short pieces of...
by Jackie Law | Jan 20, 2018 | Front page, Reviews
Having enjoyed Alison Jean Lester’s debut, Lillian on Life, I was eager to see where the author would take her readers in this, her second novel. Lillian was a woman of a certain age looking back over decades lived. This latest work is again told as a recollection,...
by Brian Gourley | Nov 6, 2017 | Front page, Reviews
My problem is the question of why we experience anything. My problem is the question of why our bodies, with their intricate perspective and processing apparatus, in addition to all that perception and processing, also produce something like an oh, so this is what...
by Yen-Rong Wong | Nov 1, 2017 | Front page, Reviews
Bae Suah’s A Greater Music is an intoxicating mix of language, nature, and sound, made all the more complex by its translation into English from Korean. Translated by Deborah Smith, the novel reads somewhat like a dream. It follows an unnamed narrator’s journey...
