​Witness by Jamel Brinkley is a collection of stories featuring a largely Black cast of characters in New York as they’re navigating the world, witnessing tragedy, and become bystanders, sometimes in their own lives. I particularly enjoyed the stories ‘Arrows’, ‘Bartow Station’, and the titular story, ‘Witness’. The first of which follows the ghost of the speaker’s mother who is stuck in their house while the speaker plans to move out. ‘Bartow Station’ follows a man who recognizes how he’d inadvertently had killed his friend when they were walking through along what they thought were abandoned train tracks. And finally, ‘Witness’ is about an unemployed brother who lives with his sister as she gets a new boyfriend who’s a DJ. She marries him quite quickly, though afterward he keeps on going out and staying away late while her health starts to deteriorate from something unknown. Eventually, she has a stroke that kills her. Her husband than finds another woman quite quickly after. The collection was quite interesting, though there were some stories that just didn’t work for me. I think as a whole, it was a decent enough read.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is about an expatriate, Jake, who travels around Spain and France with his friend Lady Brett Ashley post-World War I. It follows their nights out at bars, their café attendance, bull-fighting and fishing. In the summer, Jake and a few of the other men he’s met on his travels decide to go fishing and will meet up with Brett later for a Spain fiesta. Afterward, they attend a bull-fighting celebration that lasts a week. During this time, Brett first gets close with one of Jake’s friends, and then begins to like one of the bull-fighters. The bull-fighter does fairly well during the bull-run, killing three bulls, and afterward he takes Brett along with him to Paris. Jake goes to the south of France instead, but when he gets a telegram to meet Brett, he follows. It turns out she broke it off with the bull-fighter and even though Jake likes her, they only imagine what it would be like to be together.
 
Hemingway is known for his short and exacting sentences, which makes sense to convey an emotionally detached character. In the case of Jake, he pines for Brett while she is with other men, but mustn’t be too emotional for fear that he will become too feminine. Though I found the writing style to read closer to just a journal entry, such as “I did this, and then I did that”. Sure, it does have an effect but not one that I particularly enjoyed. At its heart, this story is about a man being friend-zoned—though friend-zoned in the twentieth century. So I can see why it’s a popular novel, but for a certain type of disaffected man. It wasn’t really the novel for me, but not terrible either.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Say Nephew by Steven Pfau is a collection of essays revolving around a nephew’s understanding of his gay uncle, Bruce, as he grows up learning he himself is gay. The essays navigate queerness and mentorship through discussions on topics such as cruising, hosting (both parties and hook-up), the kink scene, and a leather bar, among other things. The uncle-nephew relationship is also looked at in a critical lens with references to a controversial book titled The Story of Harold to the nephew of Gertrude Stein who posed for Picasso. And Pfau also discusses the more taboo side of that relationship which parallels that of a daddy/boy kink some queer men act out. Though, the essays provide an understanding of a man who has found a mentor in his alcoholic, lively, and queer uncle when he was growing up and wandering Bruce’s house that had pictures of revealing men to a moment right before he leaves for college. This moment in particular, a moment on a couch where Bruce seems to be pining for his real-life nephew when he was quite drunk, may be what enhances, or puts more nuance to, the relationship. As the speaker notes, “Whenever I could see you in the future, I could be more afraid of you, now that I know what you’re capable of…” Though, there certainly are lighter moments such as a man stealing someone else’s pee at a bathroom bar trough and pouring it over himself to a couple hosting him at a cabin while they have their way with him, or finding a stray dog and raising it. A decent read.
 
3.5/5

​The Best American Short Stories 1994 is an anthology of short stories published the year prior and selected by Tobias Wolff. There are some real bangers in this collection, such as ‘Proper Library’ by Carolyn Ferrell, ‘In the Gloaming’ by Alice Elliot Dark, ‘Pipa’s Story’ by Lan Samantha Chang, and ‘Landscape and Dream’ by Nancy Krusoe. Specifically, ‘In the Gloaming’ is about a handicapped son and his mother caring for him as he slowly deteriorates from an unmentioned disease. Though the deterioration, as opposed to other declines caused by disease, is portrayed in a dignified light, one which treats the character, Laird, as curious, wanting to know about his mother’s life before he perishes. Another story I wanted to highlight was ‘Proper Library’ which follows a boy from a rough part of New York, caring for friend’s babies, and pining for another boy. It is a sad rendition of what type of masculinity thrives and what dies when the going gets rough. Though, I am on the fence with its voice, a distinct part of the story, in part because if it crosses a line, it becomes a stereotype of Black New York youth. There was also one story that had such a strange, confusing, and frankly very controversial scene in ‘Things Left Undone’ by Christopher Tilghman that I would feel very uncomfortable describing it. I don’t know if me feeling unsettled is what the story is trying to portray, but it verges on being edgy for the sake of being edgy. Though, for all the anthology’s faults, it’s a decent read.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​AGNI Issue 101 is a collection of essays, fiction, poetry, and art mainly centered around conflict and the pain of war. There are pieces on Gaza and most notably the art feature of the issue is art done by a Palestinian artist. And the pieces I particularly liked were ‘Pandora Addresses the Court’ by Vanessa Stauffer, ‘Catching My Breath, I Nearly Forget the View’ by Jim Whiteside, ‘What I Can’t Say’ by Brandi Bird, and ‘Curly’ by Ahmed Douma. Though the piece that has stuck with me the most is ‘Florence, now a bird’ by Silja Liv Kelleris which is about a girl who begins growing wings. The government then takes her as a young girl and cages her up in the center of the town as a tourist attraction. After many years, they sew up her mouth and put a beak on her mouth. After a while, the government takes her out of the cage and makes her “fly” from the top of a building, which is really her plummeting to her death. Overall, a decent issue.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Transcription by Ben Lerner is a novel centered around an enigmatic character, Thomas, as he is about to be interviewed, his death, and his involvement in his son and granddaughter’s life. The story starts off with one of his previous students gearing up to interview him, prepping in his hotel, dropping his phone in the sink, and losing the only recording device he will have for the interview with Thomas later. Though, for the interviewer, they’re able to partially reflect on their time in college and after with the moments surrounding Thomas, and then the circumstances in which he met his wife and had his own daughter. At Thomas’s place, because he’s in his 90’s, his mental facilities have slightly eroded, which make him start to think that his student may or not be his son. Even still, the interviewer isn’t able to use his phone so instead reconstructs the interview that is soon published. The second part of the novel follows immediately after the interviewer’s reveal of the published piece, in part being a fabricated conversation with Thomas, during Thomas’s memorial service. The interviewer doesn’t believe that he was in the wrong, though most of his collogues think different of him after. The final part is an extended interview with Thomas’s son, in part about Thomas being emotionally distant as a father, while also delving into his own struggles as a parent trying to get his daughter to eat.
 
Even though the novel is quite short, Lerner is able to pack a lot of emotional weight to the interviewer thinking about his own daughter or Thomas’s son feeling frustrated at his father. It is constructed somewhat unconventionally, and even while the majority of the novel is dialogue, it still feels like it speeds along. I think in part because it’s structured around Thomas’s death and that the interviews are describing events that happened.
 
The novel is very specifically a Covid story with the granddaughter doing school online, Thomas getting Covid and his call over FaceTime, and opening with the interviewer on the train with a mask. While I think that Covid is essential in the narrative, the novel already reads of its time even if it was published last month. I think what I mean is that because Covid—at least for the middle class—was a universally cushioned isolation its descriptions and discussions of Covid don’t feel fresh or unique. Of course, because it was a collective experience then these details don’t make anything particularly sticky. What is missing, which may be intentional, is the class of people who couldn’t get their groceries delivered to them—that in fact they were the ones delivering the groceries. I think this isn’t a particularity to Lerner’s novel, but this is more of my own skepticism of Covid narratives in general: they are middle or upper middle-class experiences that are softened by lower class struggle (and specifically that lower class struggle is barely mentioned). So, while Transcription is positioned in Covid time, and its narrative centers around Covid, its impact of Covid is aesthetic only. What I mean is that the only true impact that Covid could’ve had was Thomas’s intubation. Though, while Thomas is intubated, he doesn’t die. And for the purposes of the narrative, his intubation is required for his son to open up about his feelings. But in the narrative, it could’ve been any near-death event for Thomas’s son to talk openly.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Kenyon Review Fall 2023 is comprised of two main folios: a folio on and about food, while the other is about ‘Gender as a Vessel’. These two themes create a delightful issue in which stories about people being eaten in Douglas Silver’s ‘Taste’ are situation alongside discussions about the body being remade and changed. Other pieces I was fond of were ‘Lemon Season’ by Rebecca Ackermann, ‘Thunderhead’ by Gregory Spatz, and ‘Gulp’ by Dare Williams. I think my favorite—for how strange the story was—was ‘Taste’ in which a man’s hollandaise sauce was so good, it caused people to eat each other. A decent issue overall.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Paris Review Issue 135 is a collection of fiction, poetry, interviews, features, and art that is quite jam-packed with heavy-hitters. Though for the first half of the issue, nothing particularly stood out, except the interview with P.D. James—in a bad way. The interviewer, over the course of multiple questions, goads James into discussing feminism, eventually producing a very outdated understanding of the movement. James says, “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.” James is referring to how in a college she visited, there were posters up informing students about help-lines for harassment and date-rape, which she disliked. Now, over thirty years later, the same line about people being too “PC” is spouted from the mouths of actual fascists—or in the very least neoliberals who deride the left rather than the right. Regardless, the question stands: how does political correctness instill fascism? Is it how, as a society, we’ve agreed upon a set of words to describe people and that other words are deemed inappropriate? In that case, no one was stopping P.D. James from saying what she wanted. Sure, the consequences of James’s words could bite her back, but that would be expected with anything one is to say. This interview was a low point in the issue because the rest I quite enjoyed. There was quite a bit of poetry by Carl Philips that I liked. The interview with Thom Gunn was fascinating when he talked about the classics and his process. There’s a diary of taking a semester with Allen Ginsberg, which was insightful into Ginsberg as a poet and as a person. It was alluded in his talks and in the excerpts of Ginsberg’s past lovers, and the fanboys who lingered at the edge of his class. Though, for me the breakout piece was a story by Rick DeMarinis called ‘Experience’ about a 14-year-old boy who has a Ham radio set-up in his bedroom that’s in the basement, a step-father that wears a green pinstripe suit to every meal, and a friend whose cousin showed him her privates.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf is a letter addressing the indecency of war, how society views women, and how women must fight in their own way to combat war. It details the ways in which women in Britian at the time (and largely the century before) were dependent on men, not necessarily because they needed the resources their fathers/brothers/husbands provided, but because men forced that servitude and reliance on them. Woolf outlines how education, specifically education of women, is one important pillar of preventing war. While another point she makes it noting how society must restructure itself around women independence. The message is clear in her letter: war is evil. And the man she is addressing in the letter must do what he can do as a man to prevent war, while women must separately do what they can. The letter notes the beginning of Hitler, but the devastation has not quite become apparent, seeing as Woolf passed away in 1941. It is haunting and telling, while also deeply unfortunate how even before the worst of World War II, Woolf was sounding the alarm bells.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is a novel in verse about a father and two sons dealing with the death of their mother. Quickly after the mother’s death from a fall, the family is visited by a magical crow, which acts as a physical manifestation of their grief. Sometimes it plays tricks on the boys or saves them from a demon, always looking after the family while the mother’s death looms large. Eventually, the father calls the boys out sick from school and they go to a beach to scatter the mother’s ashes.
 
Porter notes Feathers is a novel, though it is formatted closer to a poetry collection. Voices from the boys, the father, and the crow are woven through each other in verse-like stanzas. Though, the attention to line breaks doesn’t feel as attentive as some of the language which is piercing. For example, on one of the excerpts of the boys’ perspective, they question why there isn’t more commotion when their father reveals their mother is dead, “Where are the fire engines? Where is the/noise and clamour of an event like this?/Where are the strangers going out of their/way to help…”. In this way, what the boys are led to believe about death is false. It is not a cataclysm. It’s not an apocalypse. It’s a silence. Which is what this piece does so well: showing the emptiness, the holes of grief which fill with mythical creatures. Though I’m not particularly convinced it’s a novel through its formatting, which reads more like pseudo-poetry. However, all that being said, for its brevity it conveys the father’s grief well.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5​