Book Review
A Song over Miskwaa Rapids
Linda LeGarde Grover’s graceful novel "A Song over Miskwaa Rapids", set on Ojibwe land in Minnesota, pairs a sordid mystery with supernatural influences. Mozhay Point, a recurring locale from Grover’s two previous novels, hosts an...
Book Review
Otherwise
In the superb autobiographical essays of "Otherwise", Julie Marie Wade illuminates sexual orientation and body image issues. Nine intricate pieces reflect on risk, bodily autonomy, gender roles, and poetry versus prose. A series of...
Book Review
Highwire Act
In the inventive short stories of JoeAnn Hart’s Hudson Prize-winning collection "Highwire Act", people face catastrophes and discover connections with animals. Some of the stories are set in the real world; others occupy a speculative...
Book Review
Coming Out of My Skin
Jean-Baptiste Phou’s frank memoir "Coming Out of My Skin" functions as an impassioned manifesto against anti-Asian racism, which—in Phou’s experience—has been even more pernicious than homophobia. Phou, whose Chinese parents...
Book Review
Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief
Jessica Hendry Nelson’s probing memoir-in-essays "Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief" grapples with divorce, childlessness, sexual orientation, and addiction. With subjects including Nelson’s origin story (wherein her mother’s...
Book Review
Ravage & Son
Jerome Charyn’s rollicking novel Ravage & Son tours the seedy underbelly of turn-of-the-century New York City. Between 1883 and 1913, the city’s Jewish quarter witnesses the reign and fall of Lionel Ravage, a hardware and...
Book Review
My Neglected Gods
Joanne Nelson’s moving memoir-in-microessays treats her life story as mosaic, made up of glistening shards of memory and quotidian events. These pieces of no more than a few pages delve into the defining experiences of Nelson’s life...
Book Review
The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Beginners
“What if death can truly become part of the cycle of life?” That rhetorical question animates Lama Lhanang Rinpoche and Mordy Levine’s "The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Beginners", which explicates the Buddhist text, sharing...