by JAMES COBB Savage Theories by Paola Oloixarac. Translated by Roy Kesey. Soho Press, 2017, pp. 304. Pola Oloixarac’s novel Savage Theories is a work of academic fiction. That is to say, it is not a fictional version of an academic paper but a novel … Read more
by ANDREW DONG-HYUN KIM Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Grand Central Publishing, February 2017, pp. 496 Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, released early in 2017, is a landmark piece of English-language fiction for a number of reasons, but perhaps the greatest of … Read more
by Ben Murphy Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) by Thalia Field. NY: Solid Objects, 2016. pp. 264 The parenthetical subtitle of Thalia Field’s new book reads like a fallacious marketing designation—a label slapped on to tease the booksellers who have … Read more
by Mary Scott Manning Curbside Splendor Publishing, July 2017, 185 pp. “Sometimes when in the blast radius of some catastrophic act, even the most quotidian things, the dumbest everyday shit will still be immortalized,” admits Tim Taranto. His memoir, Ars … Read more
by DOREEN THIERAUF Restless Books, June 2016, 160 pp. Originally written in Spanish (2012) and masterfully translated into English by David Frye, Super Extra Grande is a genre-bending space opera as original and erudite as its author, a hair metal … Read more
by SAM BEDNARCHIK St. Louis, MO: Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017. 215 pp. By my roughly crunched count, Leonora Carrington’s complete literary output totals just over 600 pages of writing. Her Complete Stories, reissued by Dorothy in a beautiful book … Read more
by BEN MURPHY Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2016. Brian Evenson’s collection A Collapse of Horses is an experiment in incomprehension. That’s not to say that the narratives themselves are incomprehensible; rather, each of the thirteen stories depicts failures to understand. … Read more
by SAMUEL BEDNARCHIK New York City: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 Riding a wave of glowing advance buzz, Jade Chang’s debut novel The Wangs vs. The World appeared on bookshelves in early October. Chang’s novel has been deservedly praised for its … Read more
REVIEWED by DOREEN THIERAUF
Hurry Please I Want to Know is Paul Griner’s second short story collection, following the release of his third novel, Second Life, in early 2015. This eclectic yet wonderfully coherent collection proves once again Griner’s acute grasp of the complex and slippery emotions leading from gladness to mourning. Throughout, his characters take the reader on rich and elegiac journeys, each of only a few moments’ duration.
