​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​

​Story Issue 21 is a collection of stories which feature characters in weird, sometimes titillating parts of their lives. In ‘Family Travel’ by Grace Chao, a father’s fear of flying forces a family travel onto a train which kills another family. In ‘Neon Genesis’ by Robert Ren, a man begins to receive emails from his old college roommate about a current life, thus becoming so obsessed the man arrives at his old roommate’s doorstep. And my favorite story of the collection is ‘Naked Man’ by Max Kruger-Dull which is about a stage actor who sends videos of himself naked to a man on the internet named TT while also having a role in a play where he becomes naked.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Masquerade by Mike Fu is a novel about a man, Meadow, who upon housesitting for his friend, Selma, finds a novel titled, The Masquerade, which begins to eerily parallel his life. Meadow travels to Shanghai to meet up with Selma on her recent art exhibit, returning back to New York City, only to be told that Selma has gone missing. Back in New York, Meadow had once had a month-long fling with a man, but was ghosted at an aquarium. As Meadow continues to house-sit weird things begin to happen: the mirror becomes a liquid, one of the men in the novel turns up to give similar advice, and he thinks he sees his doppelgänger so tries to chase him down in the streets. However, Selma has never been a reliable person, sometimes dipping in and out of places, and lying to seem favorable. When Meadow finds his fling under a different name as a performer for the theater, he is thrown off and decides to attend a show to confront him. Though when they do finally talk, the fling gives a competent reason as to why he ghosted Meadow. Though in the end, when Meadow sees a photo that questions the legitimacy of what the fling had said, much of the novel’s coincidences and odd happenings coalesce around Selma.
 
The novel inside a novel was a fun and inventive way to provide mystery and momentum to the novel. I also thought that the dynamic between Selma and Meadow felt real in the sense that it read one-way. I also liked the weird things that happened, but because the novel didn’t fully describe the reasons why, it was a little hard for me to see how they related in the end. Though, on the whole I enjoyed this novel.
 
Final Rating:3.5/5

​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

​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