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When Pablo Martín Sánchez discovers that he shares his name with a Spanish anarchist who was executed in 1924 for the attempted overthrow of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, he sets out to reconstruct his life story. Through references to key events in Europe’s history, including the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Verdun, and the influence of intellectuals such as Miguel de Unamuno and Victor Blasco Ibañez, The Anarchist Who Shared My Name elegantly captures the life of a man who sought to resist political injustice and paid the ultimate price for his protest. Martín Sánchez’s thrilling tale is the unsettling chronicle of a dark chapter in Spanish history, as courageous as it is timely.
In 2015, Benjamin Villegas traveled to Texas in an attempt to write the biography of a music group that could have changed the history of rock: ELPASO, a Chicano band from the U.S.-Mexico border with a punk sensibility, a long since-defunct crew, and little left to remember it by but a suitcase of fanzines and one-off recordings. This is the story of one of the many bands that will never appear in rock n’ roll history books, but is at the core of the scene; a band that earned its stripes from sweaty fans and self-taught rock aficionados in basements, garages, and small venues across the country. This is the story of two kids who came together to embrace the punk ethos of the 80’s and be a part of the rock n’ roll revolution sweeping the US, a world of the Ramones, Black Flag, and, of course, ELPASO.
Welcome to Midland is a queer coming-of-age narrative in verse set against the backdrop of conservative small-town Texas. These linked poems explore the cultural and natural history of West Texas (from the horned lizard to dirt storms to Laura Bush’s car accident), connecting events and movements from across eras to create a tenuous yet strong sense of place. Giving voice to secrets and silence, Welcome to Midland considers identity, community, family, and legend.
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In this four-story suite, a modern master of Italian literature delves into the wonder, grotesquery, strangeness, and desire of the human condition. Combining and distorting elements of fables, fairy tales, and the alienating force of society, each of Moresco’s stories features the central character at a different time of his life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood. In these beautiful and unsettling narratives, a vivid physical world can’t hide the strangeness of surroundings and the dream-like logic governing events. In “Blue Room,” the adolescent protagonist carries on a voyeuristic relationship with a blind old woman in a mysterious clinic. In the title story, a stunning act of violence deepens the nightmarish tones and the protagonist’s disorientation. Moresco’s stories, full of bodily parts, functions, and desires, present a world where physical curiosity competes with shame, and the price of watchfulness is the secrecy and loneliness of isolation.
A young woman meets a man at a restaurant while eating alone and contemplating her own death. They exchange words only briefly, but by the end of the week he has entered her world with an intensity rivaled only by her desire to end her life. Told with the lyrical persistence of a Greek chorus, The Ancestry of Objects unravels the story of the unnamed narrator’s affair with David: married, graying, and ultimately a form of erotic power to which the narrator succumbs. As they meet more and more frequently, her thoughts move from their increasingly fraught encounters to her history with religion and the mystery of her absent mother, Ruth. The ghosts of her grandparents roam her ancestral hous...
Paul, a religious teen living in a small conservative town, finds his world turned upside down when he meets Manuel—a young man who says he’s both Christian and gay, two things that Paul didn’t think could coexist in one person. Doesn’t the Bible forbid homosexuality? As Paul struggles with Manuel’s interpretation of the Bible, thoughts that Paul has long tried to bury begin to surface, and he finds himself re-examining his whole life. This is an unforgettable book on an extremely timely topic that strives to open minds on both ends of the spectrum.
In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy. A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.
The Nightgown is a mythic, mystic, and hungry collection of poems, a roiling landscape wandered over by wild swerves of language, creatures of all sorts, and mysterious beings such as The Folklore, The Hurt Opera, The Eunuch, and the titular angry Nightgown. Haunted by the magic and transformations of Slavic and Western European fairy tales, the symbolism of the Tarot, the medieval world, feminism, and a mythology all its own, The Nightgown bears an immigrant’s fascination with the black, alien syrup of the English language’s first stratum, that merciless Anglo-Saxon word-hoard preserving an ancient consciousness of human, beast, and earth. Funny and loud, the poems are strangely accessible in their animal awareness of mortality and urgency for contact with the unknown. The Nightgown is the debut book of poetry from renowned writer Taisia Kitaiskaia (Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers).
Garréta’s first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sister is subsumed by concrete. Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.