By Abeer Hoque“We are all migrants through time.”Mohsin Hamid’s 4th novel Exit West like much of his work reflects and refracts our troubled times. The book follows two young lovers, Nadia and Saeed, from an unnamed country that is being torn apart by civil war. Their...
By Nicholas Alexander HayesThe summer after I returned from the Peace Corps, I sat outside of my favorite café in my home town, drinking hot coffee from a glass pint glass. I watched a couple of teen boys stare at their reflection in a florist’s window as they applied...
Review by Abeer Hoque
“His beauty was that his beauty was behind him, his appeal reflecting what he had already survived.”
Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers is a sprawling multi-generational story of working-class undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York City.
By Nicholas Alexander HayesJay Besemer and I once collaborated on a performance/workshop called “Restrictive Andragogies and Ex-Citation.” We were both at a stage in our teaching careers in which we were challenged by the way we were expected to approach our...
By Elicia ParkinsonHaving never read anything by Colin Dodds before and not knowing anything about this book before I received it, I have to admit I was startled by the beginning scenes of WATERSHED. What are these people doing on the airplane? Are they actually have...
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Peg Alford Pursell’s Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow lures the reader in with small wistful passages. They are wisps of prose that would seem to be easily consumed.
By Alvin Lu
“Not a poet-novelist,” a fictional Franz Kafka calls himself in Sonata in K. This hard-to-classify work about the misadventures of Kafka and a 38-year-old polyglot Japanese American interpreter named K in Los Angeles, Amerika’s weirdest city, is also poet Karen An-hwei Lee’s first novel.
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The beauty of a fragment is its transience. It is a tatter of what has been forgotten. The poetry of Sappho is beautiful (at least in the translations I have read.) But what has always struck me more is the poignant absence of the rest of the work.
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The titular poem of Kokumo’s collection Reacquainted with Life ends with the lines: “then find pride in where I lay/ wounded but alive.”
By Abeer HoqueThe Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is Mira Jacob’s debut novel about an immigrant South Asian girl growing up with feet in two worlds, reluctantly tied to the old country, inexorably to the new. It’s the book I’ve been wanting to read for years.The...
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The city dominates the narratives of queer literature. Radclyffe Hall sends the protagonist of The Well of Loneliness to find themselves in London and finally Paris.
By Elicia ParkinsonChris Campanioni writes in the chapter entitled Notes Written In Margins, “I am interested in the intersection between all the public interaction we have in private & the paradoxes which exist because of this divide in logic & space.”This...
By Elicia Parkinson
Most readers hear the word “metamorphosis” and think initially of Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis in which a man metamorphosizes into a cockroach.
By Nicholas Alexander HayesIn the atomic theory of the ancient Greeks, atoms moved freely throughout the void. They only begin to accumulate when one veers from its trajectory and knocks into another. The subtle process of swerving, collision and accumulation...
By Abeer Hoque The Fishermen is a magnificent debut novel by Nigerian writer Chijioke Obioma. It follows the lives of four young brothers: Ikenna (14), Boja (13), Obembe (11), and Ben (9). They are growing up in a small town in southwestern Nigeria although their Igbo...
By Sebastian Sarti
Midway through Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, the narrator delightedly describes the stains on a French girl’s coat as appearing to have come “from the pulp of a dark fruit such as damson or perhaps some elderberries.”
By Nicholas Alexander HayesAfter the massacre at a Latinx night at Pulse Orlando, Christopher Soto posted a eulogy called, “All The Dead Boys Look Like Me.” Soto expresses their frustration and exhaustion at mourning once again. They describe a moment before they...
By Nicholas HayesDaniel Borzutzky uses the word unitedstatesian, and it irritates me. The word is one I would never use in reference to the US or its citizens. It is a word that challenges the assertion of American Exceptionalism. It is a word that shows that US...
By Elicia ParkinsonIn 2001, Christian radio personality Harold Camping indicated the End of Times, Judgment Day, (aka the Rapture), would occur on May 21, 2011. While this prediction was a source of amusement for many, it was taken seriously by many of Camping’s...
By Nancy SmithThe Lonely City—part memoir, part art history, part sociological investigation—is a book that is ostensibly about loneliness. However, it often wanders into the vast, complex territory that surrounds the lonely person: authenticity, openness, curiosity,...
By Amanda Marbais
Emily Anderson’s Little Novels encourages you to re-imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder, even if you haven’t thought of Wilder since the sentimental ‘80s drama Little House on the Prairie or haven’t read On the Banks of Plum Creek since your awkward days in 6th grade.
By Ho LinIt’s generally acknowledged that the societal experiment that was China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was an unmitigated disaster, but as is often the case with such tumultuous events, official reckonings and accountings of the damage have been sporadic....
By Abeer Hoque
“Revolutions are long in the making.”
headscarvesIn 2012, Egyptian American writer and journalist Mona Eltahawy published her sensationally titled article, “Why Do They Hate Us” in Foreign Policy’s “Sex” issue.
By Heather MackeyStuck in a dead-end town on the fringe of the Bay Area, sixteen-year-old Deep Singh yearns for escape. His parents are driving him crazy. His brother—a formerly charismatic and brilliant boy—may actually be crazy. As Deep falls into an affair with a...
By Abeer Hoque“In that garden of text, you could sell a goldfish, a blowjob, an ottoman, your love.”I wanted to read American visual artist, activist, and writer Molly Crabapple’s graphic memoir Drawing Blood before seeing her at the Jaipur Lit Fest in January 2016....
By Sara Wainscott“My nationality, my accent, changes with the landscape, with the very weather,” Abeer Y. Hoque writes of herself in Olive Witch, and her resolute exploration of the limits of identity—both personal and cultural—give focus to the book’s disparate...
By Nicholas HayesJarrett Neal arrived at my Queer Literature class a few minutes before the arranged time. I was asking my class how Barbara and Jaime acted as a foil for Stephen and Mary in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. We were discussing the way social...
By Jacob Singer
“I turned entirely to provocative fiction and poetry, as I do during all my most desperate times (xi),” Allisa Nutting declares in the forward of The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers.
By Jay Besemer
Aaron Apps’ Intersex: A Memoir operates in a space that is both complex and difficult to name. There is no adjective that serves experiences or texts steeped in both horror and beauty, abjection and awe.
By Abeer Hoque
Ghana Must Go is Taiye Selasi’s tour de force first novel about a Nigerian-Ghanaian family falling apart between Ghana, the US, England, and Nigeria.