My review of Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch is live over at Literal Magazine. You can read it here.
This novel definitely made me think twice about all of the weaving, stitching, and other similar metaphors I’ve used in reviews and essays.
My review of Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch is live over at Literal Magazine. You can read it here.
This novel definitely made me think twice about all of the weaving, stitching, and other similar metaphors I’ve used in reviews and essays.
My review of Alejandra Oliva’s “Rivermouth: A Chrinoncle of Language, Faith, and Migration” is now live over at Literal Magazine. From the review:
In the book, Oliva interweaves her own life as a bilingual child of Mexican immigrants with the frustrations and exigencies of the southern border of the United States: its bureaucracy, the inhumanity, and frustrations. The book straddles the line somewhere between memoir, philosophical meditation, and policy criticism. It is most successful when Oliva uses her sophisticated views on translation as an entré into immigration.
There was a lot to like in this book, but I would only recommend it to someone particularly interested in translation.
My review of Fernanda Melchor’s fabulous collection of nonfiction “This Is Not Miami,” has appeared over at Literal Magazine. Here’s a sample from the piece:
The best stories seduce. They draw you in and make you fall for them, become infatuated with them, and you lose focus on the rest of the world and only want to know what is going to happen next, what the character will say or do, how the story will end. You stay up late. Neglect your family, your work, your other hobbies. You breathe only at the periods.
Fernanda Melchor is no stranger to such seduction.
This one of the best books I’ve reviewed recently, and I highly recommend you check it out.
My review of “Ischia” by Gisela Heffes is now live over at Literal Magazine. From the review:
“Ischia,” Gisela Heffes’ novel–originally published in 2000, and now available in an English translation by Grady C. Wray—is constituted of almost entirely of the stories the unnamed narrator tells herself. These are fictional stories with the novel, where the narrator imagines elaborate scenarios that might—though probably won’t—happen. The book asks us to consider the role that our own storytelling, and our own fantasies, play in our lives.
This book can be difficult to read at times, but it’s unique and provides a twist on storytelling that I’d been looking for.
My review of the “The Book of Eve” by Carmen Boullosa is up over at Literal Magazine. From the review:
The Book of Eve, a work of fiction by Carmen Boullosa, is cognizant of the cultural encoding in the Book of Genesis, and particularly the way it has served the interests of men. We can’t be sure who exactly wrote the creation stories in the Bible, for example, but we can be fairly sure that it wasn’t a woman. This novel thus aims at reversing the binary: at upending all of the encoded norms and themes that go along with it. Especially the patriarchal ones.
My review of “Arrthymias” by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (translated by D. P. Snyder) has now appeared over at Literal Magazine. A bit from the review:
The pleasure in reading this book comes from both its “salt and pepper” variations—the many topics, styles, approaches, and ideas covered here, with the twists that Muñiz-Huberman provides—and the singular, consistent way it chops them up into digestible, short repast.