Reviews - Who Even Reads

Cover of Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, featuring a red mazelike drawing in the shape of an apple that also resembles a fingerprint.

Reviews

A Double Exclamation in the Greater Milwaukee Area: Patrick Cottrell's Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

The other reviews and accounts of this novel I read before reading the book itself, which rightly suggested a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the proceedings, did nothing to prepare me for the several gut-punch revelations that occur near the end, revelations that hinge on specificity.

Cover of Earth 7 on an orange background matching the book's text. The cover shows a spaceship flying a meandering path away from Earth and the moon, in white on washed-out blue.

Reviews

Review: A Shot of Urgent Hope in Deb Olin Unferth's Earth 7

Earth 7 really sings in small moments that show deep respect for life, for its remarkable diversity, its endurance and durability. Unferth’s admiration for the inhabitants of Earth, its many creatures large and small, is infectious, at times exhilarating—a shot of urgent hope.

Cover of A Splintering set on a parchment-colored background, featuring a person looking through shard-like apertures that are elsewhere filled in with solid pink set against orange.

Reviews

Review: A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna and the Precarity of the Social Climb

If A Splintering is in some ways a morality tale, it isn’t one that suggests Tara is wrong for wanting more than life has given her. Rather, it shows that by defining her happiness only through the oppression of others, only through ascending from oppressed to oppressor, she remains oppressed.

Cover of No God But Us—divided into squares featuring various colored patterns, animals, and disembodied eyes—all against a muted teal background.

Reviews

Review: No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed and the Refugee Liminal State

No God But Us vividly illuminates what life is like for the many queer refugees who live in liminal space for years, whose only home is the state of uncertainty.

Cover of Let the Poets Govern, with gold blocky text on an olive-green background, itself laid onto a brown-to-gold gradient background.

Reviews

Review: Camonghne Felix's Let the Poets Govern and the Scam of Representation

Felix stresses that real, substantial change isn’t instant, nor does it happen without us—without people. But real change is happening, will happen, must happen despite the liberal cynicism and fear that will tell you it isn’t, won’t, can’t.

Cover of Dear Monica Lewinsky, featuring a medieval drawing of a knight stabbing a person with a sword

Reviews

Review: Julia Langbein Gets Ruthless in Dear Monica Lewinsky

Lewinsky is Virgil, capably leading Jean through the inferno of predatory male sexual behavior, demonstrating to her that the power she wields—wielded even when she was being taken advantage of—is a force to be reckoned with.

Solid bright pink cover of The Beginning Comes After the End on bright green background.

Reviews

Review: Rebecca Solnit and Alysa Liu Both Know, The Beginning Comes After the End

While we might be living through what is commonly referred to as late-stage capitalism, we are not at the end of anything—we are always in the middle of an unfolding story.

Cover of Persona, against a sickly green background that matches the title text, featuring the lower half of a person's face with eyes blotted out by grey brushstrokes.

Reviews

Review: Aoife Josie Clements' Persona and the Horror of Being

Persona’s title and premise of two women who seem to share some aspects of their identities is evocative of the Bergman film of the same name, but it is also a rich exploration of technological isolation that centers on what one character calls the Default Persona.

Magenta text, image, and main background against blue/turquoise cover of Senaa Ahmad's The Age of Calamities. The magenta image is of a knight on a horse slaying a dragon.

Reviews

Review: Lizzie Borden and Anne Boleyn Topple the Patriarchy in The Age of Calamities

A work of quirky alternative history gives agency to women who struggled under the yoke of patriarchy, including Anne Boleyn, Nellie Bly, and Joan of Arc.

Cover of Nina McConigley's How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder against a green background, featuring a red-nailed hand wrapped around a container of antifreeze.

Reviews

Review: Nina McConigley's How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, Being a Biracial Asian in 1980s America, and Other Things Best Left to the Experts

In which I write about Nina McConigley's debut novel and fall far into comparisons to my own biracial childhood and adolescence in the 1980s and '90s, as well as musings on Asian American literature.

The cover of Bryan Washington's Palaver, featuring the glow of a vending machine and murky surrounding cityscape, against a light pink background.

Reviews

Review: Reading Queer Isolation in Bryan Washington's Palaver

When you’re living in the fishbowl of your own queer life, when it’s all you’ve ever known, you might not recognize that the people who have always surrounded you do not treat you with a great deal of care. This is the phenomenon that Palaver represents so well.

Cover of The Unveiling on a light blue background. The jacket features an upside-down iceberg, the submerged part against a deep red gradient, the tip emerging into blue sky underneath.

Reviews

Review: Race and Realisms in Quan Barry’s The Unveiling

While reading Quan Barry’s new novel The Unveiling alongside Tiphanie Yanique's "On Character," I was struck by how it reflects Yanique's expansive approach to realism for authors of color, demonstrating a way to write fiction beyond the limits of the psychological.