Amanda Marshall City of Wisdom and Blood, the second installment in the Fortunes of France series, is a fast paced historical fiction novel, taking place in 1566 France. Told through the eyes of a fifteen year old nobleman Pierre…
Alyssa Clark The Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze opens with the falling apart of a marriage as the story’s protagonist, Levan, is left by his wife. The scene is the first of many that shows Levan’s hopeless nature as…
Rae Gouirand In one direction I thought elephants— trunks geometric, consistent, boxed. Around those a border of phoenixes cascading from triangular forms. All on a sea of red. For years I saw these whenever I…
Carlie Braden A crooked detective, a flashy newbie cop, and a serial killer with a dark sense of humor; these are the main characters in Bavo Dhooge’s newly translated novel Styx. To add to the novel’s plot, time…
Rae Gouirand She wakes in the cool from her sound place beneath, her back to me, and asks if I would please touch her back again, just touch her, before she opens her eyes. As badly…
Milagros Green Lavalle For those who grew up in Miami, Florida, they may instantly find themselves back in the Sunshine state with a new perspective of its beaches and canals that snake throughout neighborhoods. Florida children may remember…
Kevin Welch Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Vietnam War novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press), takes a unique approach revealing itself as a North Vietnamese Army spy’s forced confession to his commandant upon returning to Vietnam from a lengthy stay in America.…
John Newlin Rinker Buck’s latest book chronicling his brother’s and his trip across most of the Oregon Trail on a Schuttler covered wagon, pulled by a team of three mules, deserves a place among the excellent biographies and travel…
Justin Mundhenk Too often the Appalachian experience—like so many marginalized American experiences—is trivialized and caricatured, and unfortunately, the literary world is no stranger to such practices. Local color writing introduced 19th-century Americans to the hillbilly bumpkin, a stereotype that…
Kathleen Nalley and Gabrielle Brant Freeman Dear Kathleen, So, you know those fabric and yarn “Crashing Witch” Halloween decorations that you start to see in Michael’s in, like, August? Yeah, well, Denise and Maureen wrote a poem about…