by TARAS V. MIKHAILIUK David Biespiel. The Education of a Young Poet. Counterpoint Press, October 2017, pp. 192. Part memoir, part imaginative recollection, David Biespiel’s Education of a Young Poet (Counterpoint Press, 2017) participates in two major traditions of Western literature. Unlike … Continued

by KARAH MITCHELL Filip Springer, History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town Originally published 2011. English translation by Sean Gaspar Bye, April 2017. Restless Books: Brooklyn, NY, pp 320 Imagine a medieval town in the countryside … Continued

by KYLAN RICE Gatherest by Sasha Steensen. Ahsahta Press, 2017. pp. 128 Sometimes I like to think of the poem as a child. The poet gives a kind of birth to a kind of offspring, a word. As it was … Continued

by JOHN BECHTOLD The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. New York: Grove Press, 2017. pp. 207 Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, describing what distinguishes good art from pedestrian work, wrote, “the greatest art is impersonal because it shows us the world, … Continued

by KYLAN RICE The End of Something by Kate Greenstreet. Ahsahta Press, 2017. pp. 176. When she reads out loud, Kate Greenstreet’s poems sound like they’re being spoken during a smoke break outside a bar. Her hands are in her pockets, … Continued

by DON HOLMES The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. Introduction by Vann R. Newkirk. Illustrations by Steve Prince. Restless Books, 2017, pp. 239 First published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk remains an iconic text that conceptualizes … Continued

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 … Continued

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 … Continued

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 … Continued

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 … Continued