WAKE, SIREN: Gripping, fearless, violent, and uncompromising. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are ancient stories of mythological transformation, and the cost of those transformations (as anyone familiar with this work will know) is paid with the bodies and hearts of mortal women. These are not happy tales, but they never were. Nina MacLaughlin frees the victims of mythology to scream and rage in the context of our current time, released from their silence, come back to let us know they haven’t forgotten their much-sung fates, or who, in the end, was to blame. One of the most challenging and strong collections I’ve ever read.
I will listen to Margaret Atwood pontificate on anything and enjoy it thoroughly. This book is a lot of loosely related, widely meandering odds and ends, but: A. I adore Atwood and it’s a pleasure just to hear her humor and insight, even in fragments, and B. I still found plenty of thought-provoking snippets to highlight and return to.
This book is akin to being trapped at a diner booth with David as he tells you a thousand extremely random anecdotes about his life for hours on end, while a kindly friend interjects occassionally with clarifying facts. And that diner booth is exactly where I want to be. The uncompromising way Lynch devoted his life to art made him half madman and half patron saint. He was both and neither, but unquestionably a bright light mourned by many who understand the call to keep making things, however they might be received, because… we just have to. Also, the many photographs included from David’s personal collection are absolutely fantastic.
THE DEVILS is my first foray into Joe Abercrombie’s work, and I may be hooked. This novel is a genuine adventure, with a strong ensemble cast, an ever-morphing plot, gorgeous worldbuilding, and no easy solutions. It succeeds in delivering big fun while still letting darkness be darkness–a playground for the morally gray. The characters are all richly realized, deliciously despicable and endearing.
ESH Leighton’s debut novel JOURNEY MAN is both gritty and glittering, corporeal in detail and cosmic in consequence. Itself a kind of mythical place for every artist, NYC serves as a capable portal through which Leighton thrusts a world-weary protagonist we can all recognize ourselves in. This book is sexy, slick, and one hell of a ride!
It’s so interesting to read Virginia Woolf in the 21st century, especially as someone who was born in the 1980s. Woolf was also born in the ’80s… the 1880s… and reached adulthood at the dawn of a new century, a new era where the world’s social and technological changes seemed staggering and impossible to reverse. I feel a kinship with her; I’ve seen my own new century turn over into an unrecognizable present, and like Woolf, I believe that it has brought with it new ways of thinking and being that will require new expression to capture. The way Woolf re-imagined language to reflect a tempestuous and expansive inner world remains shocking and boundary-pushing, even today. I love how courageously extravagant, personal, and surreal her writing is, and while it seems like the central purpose of this work was largely self-serving, in the process she created something so entirely strange and resonant that there was no going back once this book entered the world. A person’s mind and heart can be so much more fluid and unpredictable than what fits inside the strict bounds of Victorian literature. With her modernist Orlando, Woolf gave one of the strongest, most enduring kicks to the walls. She wrote about identity and art with a stylistic confidence that, just like Orlando herself, remains ever-changing and vital as the centuries keep ticking by.
RED TEMPEST BROTHER is a satisfying conclusion to H.M. Long’s pirate fantasy trilogy. This installment takes us further out to sea, and further into the forces that govern, haunt, and disrupt the Winter Sea and beyond. Old friends (and enemies) return, ploys cross and double-cross, and Long’s expansive imagination is on full display with one of the most exciting examples of fantasy worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. This is a world and a “comfort read” trilogy I know I will long to return to.
THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD sings across the water with a startling voice, rich with haunted children, final chances, cursed dilemmas, and full-blooded enchantment. Molly Olguín’s stories feel very new and very old at the same time: delicate, deft, disruptive. Prepare to be sad. Also, prepare to be wowed.
Had to bust out my dive watch for the decadently creepy REEF MIND from Hazel Zorn. This book is a climate anxiety-fueled nightmare: immediate, skin-crawling, and amorphic. Standing ovation for this brand new indie banger–Zorn packs a beautiful death punch into a slim, devourable novella.
I really respect nonfiction that is both unflinching in fidelity to the truth of its subjects’ lives, but also demonstrates a tenderness for their humanity. In A MARRIAGE AT SEA, Sophie Elmhirst creates a faithful portrait of a relationship that not only survived an ordeal of incomprehensible danger, but which was built around it. The survival story itself is riveting, but I also appreciate how the book ponders the unique love between these two flawed but fearless people who craved escape more than anything and found it in each other.
