Food for thought – Page 2

‘Birth Canal’ a Kaleidoscopic View of Obsession, Trauma

The cover of Birth Canal, which features an untidy rectangular border of vines and flowers entangled around the title and author at the bottom of the cover on a background of orange in the center and purple at the edges.

The most fascinating thing with Birth Canal as a whole is its dizzying range of vibes that can be pulled out of a narrow cast of characters in a handful of places and only a couple of eras in history.

‘Heartwood’ Explores Questions Behind Headline

This is not a story of tricky plot devices and big reveals. Instead, it’s a portrait of a search for a missing person, and how it takes a community of professionals and amateurs, friends and strangers, to locate them.

‘Antidote’ Offers Dreamlike Path to Cure for Hard Times

A rainbow gradient cascades over a black-and-white photograph of an old farmhouse with a weather vane and farming equipment. The image is fuzzy, as though in the middle of a dust storm. The title and author (The Antidote, Karen Russell) are superimposed upon it.

As The Antidote reminds us, there’s no understanding a place, or its people, if there is no reconciliation with the most difficult parts of that person or place.

‘Grief’ a Multifaceted Examination of Sorrow

Upon a light orange background, the title and author are in underlined purple all-caps text that looks as though it has crumbled all to one corner.

Crosley’s writing brings the events, and her emotions, to life, and helps make her every action and reaction reasonable, even, and especially, when she knows they’re not. It is that prose-level finesse, not the subject matter, that helps keep this slim volume feeling relevant even when it occasionally strays into self-indulgence.

The Apocalypse Grows Strangely in ‘The Garden’

Flowers and greenery splay across a bubbled surface of glass or thin ice as a background to the title and author of Nick Newman's novel The Garden.

The Garden is as much about the testing, and mending, of a sisterly relationship as anything else. The apocalypse is merely a reason for their cloistering, and the reckoning they face with each other.

‘First Love’ Considers Friendship in its Many Forms

The title of the book (First Love: Essays on Friendship) and author name are superimposed on a photograph of three young fair-skinned girls, one of whom is the author, smoking and laughing on a fire escape.

While her takes on friendship may come from places of personal specificity, they nonetheless find broad resonance in how I think most of us have thought of friendship, even if unconsciously.

‘Horror’ Examines the Shadow of Genre – and Within

There’s no horror in a vacuum, Horror Movie seems to be telling us, and the way we ingest and interact with it says as much about us as the content itself.

‘Beijing’ May Sprawl, but the Stakes are Personal

The cover of Beijing Sprawl, featuring an olive-green background and a series of about 17 bold-type "Beijing" stacked down like a deck of cards. "Sprawl" sits below the stack.

The stories within Beijing Sprawl aren’t cozy or happy, necessarily, but they feel like they capture a moment of life that will become nostalgic, and that growing nostalgia bleeds through the page.

Despite Unevenness, ‘Deer Woman’ a Compelling Read

The disjointed nature between the flowing river of words and characterizations afforded Starr and those she comes into contact with versus the gravel pit given to the villains makes Deer Woman feel at times as though it had been written by two authors taking turns, or composed of two different manuscripts shuffled together.

‘Death’ Asks Timely Questions with Robots

Death of the Author has a lot to say about art, its creation, and those who make it for us that is more relevant than ever.