​Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a nonfiction piece which explores the personal history and significance of blue as a color, life event, and feeling. Throughout the essay, Nelson addresses a “you”, which we learn was once a lover, but now no longer. We get moments discussing Nelson’s visits to her friend who was paralyzed by an accident, moments of sex, and her observances life around her. It also brushes against the history of blue as a color and its uses in literature and philosophy.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is collection of stories steeped in online subcultures, sexuality, and irony. The novel charts the lives of people spiraling into the alt-right pipeline, becoming abusers, repressing and then engaging in their sexuality, and humorously nodding to online conspiracy theories. I really enjoyed all the stories, though in particular, two stood out as the heavyweights, ‘Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression’ and ‘Main Character’. ‘Ahehao’ is about a closeted gay Taiwanese American, Kant, who’s repression manifests in the desire of sexual degradation in gay hentai. The story follows Kant as he first comes out to his friends and family through an email, and begins to explore dating and relationships in his mid-thirties. However, when he starts to date another man, Julian, he is reluctant to have sex due to his worry that he can’t keep his desires at bay. Eventually, they have a falling out and Kant becomes consumed by trying to get an actor to film a video that includes all of his sexual fantasies. But when he sends the email, he realizes it wasn’t sent to the adult actor, but instead to the list of friends and family he came out to. ‘Main Character’ follows the life of “Bee” who abhors the idea of labels on race, gender, and sexuality so much so that it gets Bee into trouble at their college co-op. Eventually, Bee turns to the internet to satiate their desires to “stir the pot”, where they confess in a post that they created thousands of bot accounts to wreak havoc and create discourse, all while their mother is dying of cancer. However, the story itself notes that what Bee describes is really an AI-generated story and none of it was true. The story then takes a step back, noting the theories of who Bee is and in one theory, lists Tony Tulathimutte as the originator of the Bee post.
 
Tulathimutte is a genius at metafiction, nihilism, and humor in his stories which made me feel completely wrapped up in their dramas. ‘Main Character’ itself has so many twists and turns in its narrative that I was left astounded. I did have one small gripe, which was the ending of the first story, ‘The Feminist’. In it, the main character grows up going to school with mostly girls, so assimilates into the identity of a true “feminist”, and what I assume what the internet would call a “Nice Guy”. As the story continues, he is continually rejected by women due to his “feminist” performances, eventually leading him down into the “red pilled” world of incels and the alt-right. The last scene showcases his metamorphosis as he enters a restaurant planning to shoot it up. The ending felt off because, as a reader, I’d gotten enough clues to understand who the character was and his descent into radicalization, so the payoff of his actions felt cheap and too expected. In going with Tulathimutte’s theme of the use of the internet and slightly experimental forms, I wished it went in a different direction (i.e. manifesto). However, that is the only small problem I had with the collection, and was completely entranced the rest of the time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe is a novel about an entomologist who goes to the desert in search of a beetle. However, when he arrives to the desert, and there are no insects in sight, he eventually comes upon a village that has burrowed holes into the sand where their homes sit. The man asks for a place to stay, and is brought down into one of the holes, where a woman about his age lives. Though, while the man intends to leave the following day, the woman and the village intend to keep him far longer. Every night, the woman digs up the sand that has settled on the ground, where it is pulled up by other villagers, so that they won’t be buried. It’s a constant and unrelenting task that consumes the woman’s time. The man, having realized he’s stuck in the hole with the woman, tries to escape. First by trying to climb the steep walls, then by trying to dig out the sand so that it slopes more easily. All of his attempts fail, and gets him injured, where the woman cares for him for a few days. Thus, their life follows this routine, with the man trying to bide his time for an opening. Then, about two months in, he ties up the woman and tries to use her as his prisoner, pleading with the other villagers taking up the sand that she will die if he isn’t let out. Though, they don’t head his word. His final attempt at escape comes when he drugs the woman with sake and medicine, tying anything he can find into a rope where the ladders are anchored. When he’s successful in hooking his grappling, the man flees from the hole to wait on the outskirts of the village where he can get to the highway. But as he walks, he realizes he’s hit the center of the village, where he runs and gets caught in quicksand. The villagers help him from the quicksand, but throw him back in the hole with the woman. Then, their life returns to what it had been: digging the sand, in addition to falling in love. The thought of escape eventually falls away, and when the woman gets pregnant and is taken to the hospital while the villagers left the ladder in the hole, the man doesn’t leave.
 
Abe is a master at crafting stories that have elements of strangeness in them. The village that has burrowed their homes into the sand, and now have an endless task before them of digging the sand out, is such an odd but interesting setting. Early on, the man thinks of ways that would stop them from having to dig, but it soon becomes apparent that their perpetual lives are ones the village is not interesting in changing. To me, it can read as an allegory in which tradition, no matter how illogical, becomes the facet for which societies create and sustain meaning. And with the man’s continual attempts to escape, the ending becomes a surprise when he doesn’t immediately book it. In a way, he has found comfort in the woman, the sand, such that he’s lulled into the routine. I also was fully immersed into the minutia of the man’s life, of how the sand must be delt with, how it settles everywhere, and his dwindling hope of ever truly escaping. Abe sets us up in the beginning with the knowledge that the man will have been missing for seven years (and presumably longer), which sets the tone for all the man’s attempts. We know that he doesn’t return for at least seven years, while the story follows the first few months of his life in the hole. Thus, signaling to the reader that none of the man’s attempts were ever successful even as they’re read in the moment. It was a truly weird, but fun read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Tenth of December by George Saunders is a collection of stories which broach science fiction. One of the more famous stories, ‘Escape from Spiderhead’, is about a group of convicts that are used as lab rats to test chemical concoctions that create intense love out of thin air, makes someone experience the worst feelings ever, and notice the beauty in mundane things. It was one of the better stories, as Saunders’s writing style can at times lead with its voice. Though, other stories I liked were, ‘Victory Lap’, about a kid who sees a man try to abduct his neighbor so throws a geode at the man’s head and eventually kills him, while the title story, ‘Tenth of December’, is about a kid who sees a man walking in ten-degree weather so tries to save him by bringing a coat across a partially frozen pond. The kid falls in, and while the man wanted to die in the cold, he saves the kid, and eventually the kid saves him. For most of the stories however, I don’t think I was the audience as the references and language tipped almost too much into sci-fi territory. Though, the few I mentioned, I did like.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​American Short Fiction Issue 80 is a collection of short stories that are sometimes quiet, sometimes blaringly loud. In Joshua Henkin’s ‘Outer Boroughs’, a daughter is trying to buy a car at the behest of her cancer-stricken father. In Laura Grothaus’s ‘A Place Where Sadness Cannot Go’, a babysitter watches over Eli, a child who gets bullied and has a robotic dog that tries to fix him. And in Matthew Lawrence Garcia’s ‘Harmony’, a high schooler learns that his best friend, C, was sexually assaulted after boxing practice. These stories in particular were painful in a quiet, but meaningful way.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Erasure by Percival Everett is a novel about a writer, Monk, who, after many failed attempts to get his current manuscript published, decides to capitulate to stereotypes of the Black community by writing a novel that satirizes his contemporaries. He needs the money after his sister, an abortion doctor, is murdered and his mother’s Alzheimer’s begins to consume her. Monk’s older brother as well is having money troubles after his affair with another man leads to his divorce and little custody with his children. Monk sees the success of another Black writer, Jaunita Mae Jenkins, whose novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, is massively successful but completely stereotypical and uninformed. Monk is so fed up with seeing that novel garner attention, he decides to write his own, satirizing Jenkins and the institutions that prop her writing up. He pens the novel, Fuck, under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. When Monk sends the manuscript to his agent, his agent is super wary of his reputation being smeared. Though, very quickly, the novel gets bought for six hundred thousand dollars, with the film rights being sold after for three million. Monk is astounded at how the world thinks Stagg’s novel is “raw”, but due to financial constraints, he decides to go with the act. Monk is then put on an award committee, where soon all the judges rave about Fuck, picking it as their winner. At the end, Monk has become fed up with how everyone doesn’t see how terrible of a novel Fuck is, so when Stagg is called up to receive the award, Monk goes up to reveal he was the real author. Other plotlines involve Monk’s mother’s health worsening, Monk’s brother being in and out in their mother’s time of need, the housekeeper marrying a guard from their summer home neighborhood, and Monk’s fling with a neighbor from their summer home.
 
One of the most notable things in Erasure is that the novel, Fuck, isn’t just referenced in the novel, but it’s fully written in it. A novel within a novel. This allows for the reader to truly understand the breadth of satire that Monk is trying to achieve. Everett isn’t afraid to insert whole lectures, Monk’s CV, a scene of a Black man on a game show, and bits of other novel ideas. It’s a somewhat experimental and metafictional text. And while I initially found the game show moment to be odd (it’s a whole different character and situation), it showed that the Black man was supposed to be someone who lost the game show with difficult questions, while the white man he was competing with had simple questions. The novel at times is humorous and strange, but that’s what I felt enhanced the absurdity of everyone loving Stagg’s novel.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5