Monthly Archives: May 2025

This is a deeply unsettling book. It reminded me a bit of Eleanor Davis’ work because of how it imagines what apocalypse will feel like in these terrifyingly concrete ways that also have a sort of manic playful quality (though Graham is mostly grim). Both authors explore the contours of a dire future with anContinueContinue reading “To 2040, Jorie Graham”

When I (re)read this with a group of Ukrainian students last year, I did so with a kind of speculative curiosity, wondering if and how they’d connect to it, whether it would be relevant to them. This time around was different, in that I had a kind of template for how they’d react, and yetContinueContinue reading “Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua”

I was surprised by how much my class enjoyed this novel, because it’s weird and formally complex and fairly opaque, and the narrator is often annoying, or at least, doing blatantly stupid things. I think Heti really strains relatability with this one, but I could be totally wrong, because my students did in fact seemContinueContinue reading “How Should a Person Be? Sheila Heti”

I first heard the title poem of this collection during a book launch held over Zoom during pandemic lockdown, and it lingered with me for days — “I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know” — it seemed so prescient (this was published in DECEMBER 2019?!), but then,ContinueContinue reading “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi”

Slender novel by a relatively obscure woman author, re-released with a foreword by Ann Patchett and a blurb saying that it’s a “quiet little stunner” — sounds like exactly my cup of tea, no? But maybe I set my expectations a bit high. It was perfectly fine — engaging prose, vivid characters. The profound moralContinueContinue reading “The All of It, Jeannette Haien”