Editors' Picks
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Recent Reviews
Fiction
When in Vanuatu
Imagine sipping coffee from the comfort of your home when your husband suddenly notices a job posting at the back of The Economist that sounds absolutely perfect for him. “This is the kind of job I worked for all the way through graduate school, the kind of work […]
Memoir and Autobiography
Don’t Ask My Name
During war time, how does a mother explain the impending doom enveloping the community to her ten-year-old daughter? She doesn’t. She bottles it up, keeps everyone quiet and focused. Erika Hecht’s memoir Don’t Ask My Name uncovers one family’s trail of exhausting sojourns-for-survival during one of the bleakest […]
Nonfiction
Razor Wire Wilderness
Similar to Orange is the New Black, Razor Wire Wilderness is mostly about female inmates, the unique difficulties female inmates endure while incarcerated, and the common choices and traumas that contribute to a large number of women committing certain crimes. And similar to Piper Kerman’s retelling of her […]
Poetry
The Shadow List
Jen Sookfong Lee is a novelist and with this first book of her poetry, I got the sense of reading a novel. There is a flow to the narrative that kept me engaged as if listening to revelations that could not be interrupted. The content is disturbing, which […]
Aether: An Out-of-Body Lyric
“Aether,” as those of a certain age, as I am, may remember, “was used in medicine in the past to prevent patients from feeling pain during operations.” It has also been defined as “the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere.” The lyric […]