Book Review
The Way of the Saints
Based on Elizabeth Engelman’s family history and experiences growing up as the daughter of a Santeria priestess, the short story collection "The Way of the Saints" charts Puerto Rico’s history of colonization, revolution, migration,...
Book Review
How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying
Great for any person who perennially insists that they’re a “fun-gi” at family functions, Frank Hyman’s "How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying" is a fascinating guidebook that’ll earn its place on any bookshelf, even if the...
Book Review
Sickening
“Health is a capacious category, inextricable from the entire social world,” says Anne Pollock in "Sickening", about how societies’ intricacies and ills are reflected back in the ways health is conceptualized, stratified, and...
Book Review
And Then the Gray Heaven
Beautiful and tragic, RE Katz’s novel "And Then the Gray Heaven" embodies “the whole blessed void: a vast field of care” as it recounts the gradual process of laying the dead to rest. Jules, a queer kid who “no one was watching...
Book Review
Two Tribes
A thought experiment wrapped in a science fiction novel, Chris Beckett’s "Two Tribes" audits Brexit and Britain’s current political and class gulf from a dystopian future, as a historian tries to find the origins of her world in the...
Book Review
Any Other World Will Do
Alex Lubertozzi’s science fiction novel "Any Other World Will Do" presents an alien vision of Earth’s possible future. It’s a send-up of the genre that wraps its earnest warning in plausible deniability. In 1986, Barcelona teems...
Book Review
Antiman
Rajiv Mohabir’s poetic memoir "Antiman" traces colonialism’s ongoing legacy within the hybrid identities of he and his family. A descendant of indenture, Mohabir’s family moved from India to Guyana to work as coolies in the sugar...
Book Review
Here Is a Game We Could Play
In Jenny Bitner’s Here Is A Game We Could Play, twenty-four-year-old Claudia is trapped on the banks of the Susquehanna River, in a town too full of people to be a ghost town, yet too stripped of opportunity to be truly alive. Here,...