​Exhibit by R.O. Kwon is a novel about Jin, a photographer, who one night at a party with her husband, Philip, meets Lidija, a ballet dancer on hiatus, and starts an affair. Jin and Lidija have a fiery relationship, one adorned in BDSM and secrecy, though it becomes increasingly tough for Jin to hide her relationship from Philip. Jin opens up to Lidija about a curse on her family in which a couple kills themselves over their forbidden love. All this comes to a head when Jin’s mother falls from a hiking trip in Seoul, hits her head, and is hospitalized. Jin flies to take care of her family, where it is eventually revealed she’s been having an affair with Lidija after Philip finds photos of Lidija. Philip is at first astounded, but then comes to terms with Jin, only asking her to stay with him if they can still have kids. Jin is apprehensive over this fact, instead dipping headlong back into her art.
 
Kwon’s writing style is the most unique part of this novel. It’s filled with sharp, compact, and dense sentences that read closer to poetry rather than regular prose. I also found the kisaeng’s story, which is infused within the narrative, added an almost mythological aspect to the novel. Mostly I enjoyed its play with language and the vividness of the scenes it evoked.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is a novel about a poetry professor who, one day doubles over in pain and is eventually taken to the hospital by his partner, L. The pain is initially a mystery where many doctors and nurses prod and test him, as he spends his first few days in the ICU. He later learns that the pain was from a nearly ruptured artery in the aorta, and that the mortality rate of not being treated for five days had been seventy-five percent. The follows the speaker through the tedium of being a patient in the hospital, his life in Iowa where a tree fell on their roof in a recent storm, and the mulling over of poetry. He has a few close calls when his blood pressure rises and feels the excruciating pain, but eventually the doctors find that he’s gotten better. So, he’s brought home where he becomes extra appreciative of his life.
 
The novel starts out with loads of anxiety, in which the question of what the pain was or how it came about, but soon fills the space with the slowness and minute details of hospital life. It works for this novel because that initial disorientation doesn’t continue, though at times it felt like that slowness sometimes worked against it. The speaker and L also had bought an old house that worked a practical and physical metaphor for the speaker’s body when the tree came crashing down on the roof. I enjoyed it on the whole, but did feel it drag in the middle.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Wickedest by Caleb Femi is a collection of poems which follows the happenings of a house party in south London in one night. I particularly liked the poems ‘Pass the Aux’, ‘Fredrick Stick Talks in Another Dimension’, ‘myth says South London boys don’t dance’, and ‘Brenda gives a pep talk to Abu’. The poems exude an energy of the house party, throwing away the idea of responsibility, and letting loose. Though, near the end, there’s a solemnness to the collection where Femi writes, “The stubborn weight of our giggling skulls/painted in your years./Remember us well.” A firecracker of a collection.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

Tin House Issue 60 is a collection of poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and interviews. Most notably, they interviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard on his six-book series autobiography. I also particularly enjoyed the fiction in this issue, ‘About My Aunt’ by Joan Silber, ‘When We Realize We Are Broke’ by Manuel Gonzales, ‘Before the Bombing’ by Jonathan Lee, and ‘Primal Scenes’ by Kenneth Calhoun. Though, I think the story that was the most haunting, dark, but needed was Adam Johnson’s ‘Dark Meadow’. I liked this issue, and found myself enraptured by the interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
 
Final Rating: 4/5
 

​Death Valley by Melissa Broder is a novel in which a writer, needing to find inspiration for her novel, goes to a Best Western in the Los Angeles desert while her father is on life support and her husband is dealing with a chronic disease. While at the hotel, she Facetimes her father to check in how he’s doing after a car crash, as well as talking to her husband. She’s told by the receptionist at the Best Western there’s a trail to hike, so she goes on that trail only to find a massive cactus with a wound along its length. She pushes her hand into it, and finds out she can go inside. While inside, it soon dawns on her that there’s someone else in the cactus: her father as a young boy making a sandcastle. She returns the following day to the cactus where now her father is a teen smoking a cigarette while her husband is a wheezing small child. On the third day, when she tells the receptionist she’s returning to LA, she doesn’t find the cactus. So she continues down the trail trying to find it, when she soon realizes she’s gotten lost. She tries to take different branching paths, then hikes up to the summit of a mountain to look out. But as she climbs, she slips and injures her leg and arm. She has to then find her way back by crawling. Though, the night is settling in so she makes a fire and sleeps. The next day, she tries to tempt a few rabbits to show her where nonpoisonous food is. Eventually, she finds a group of rabbits huddled around a cactus. She opens the cactus up and eats it, only to find out that it gives her diarrhea. She’s about to give in when a massive bird flies down, picking her up, and taking her to the top of the mountain. She believes this is her father in bird form, who she thinks has passed away. Then she crawls down, knowing it’s the right path when she arrives to the cactus. She gets inside and soon her father is culling her with a bottle of Dr. Pepper, then is replaced with a corpse of her father that she must bury. But when she digs, her tears create a river inside the cactus, and she sees her husband wading in. After these visions, she crawls out of the cactus, and can hear the receptionist searching for her. Then when she is rescued, we learn that her father isn’t dead and her love for her husband has deepened.
 
This novel tackles heavy topics such as death and chronic illness in a slightly humorous and meaningful tone. The narrator talks with rocks, rabbits, birds, flowers, really anything which puts into perspective her situation while she is close to death. It felt really fast paced and the voice was what carried it along. A weird, funny, and surreal read!
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Iowa Review Winter 2023/24 is a collection of poetry, essays, and short stories. This issue had some really strong short stories that I particularly liked. The first was ‘Invisibilia’ by Tom Howard which features a family on the brink of divorce while all the family members either start to become invisible or shrink. I was also a big fan of ‘Family Video’ by Gracie Newman where two brothers take their grandmother’s old VHS tapes to a video rental store, fighting and remembering the love and abuse of their grandmother. There was ‘Human Resources’ by Brynne Jones which is about a woman working a corporate job when a strange girl appears at her door and as the story goes on, the girl becomes younger until she’s just an egg. And finally, I really enjoyed ‘Rifleman’ by Alex Burchfield about a Home Depot manager who befriends one of his workers, Andromeda/Andy, before a shoplifter comes into the store with a gun. For me, the stories in this issue really packed a punch, treading sometimes into the surreal.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Granta Issue 67 is a collection of essays and stories centered around, ‘Women and Children First’ (i.e. the idea that they are the first people to be saved during tragedies). The issue opens with a discussion on the movie Titanic and the truth behind whether the band actually played as the ship sank and what song were they playing. Another essay documents the experience of being bombed for a year in Yugoslavia. Another featured essay from Edward Said describes his upbringing as a Palestinian and the norms and cultures his parents surround him in. There’s an essay about Iraq, a photo collection of Mennonites in Canada, and an essay on the experience of a journalist witnessing the inhumane conditions and slaughtering of refugees in Kibeho, Rwanda as the UN officers watched on. The story that I particularly enjoyed was, ‘Telling Him’, by Edmund White in which a gay American in France has a relationship with a married Frenchman. All the while, the American knows he is HIV positive and is worried that when he tells the Frenchman, they will fight or become violent. This issue of Granta felt especially prescient in its discussions of war, refugees, and Palestine even though it was published in 1999.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Grief Sequence by Prageeta Sharma is a collection of poems about the loss of her husband, Dale, due to esophageal cancer. It’s a painful, though important look at how or what a person is supposed to do with the grief they have. I particularly enjoyed, ‘Complicated Spiritual Grief, Part 1’, ‘Sequence 7’, and ‘Returning to Our Creation Myth’. There are moments where the speaker takes Dale’s medication away because they are being over prescribed or sending Dale’s ashes down a river. In the poem, ‘March Wind’, I was floored by what Sharma writes, “I learn that there are two winters and two early springs happening at the same time and I have to turn one season to the other to get past their painful awakenings. It’s just a snow patch. It’s still melting.”
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Austral by Carlos Fonseca is a novel about a professor, Julio, who digs up the past after receiving a request to edit the last novel of his dead friend, Aliza Abravanel. He’s sent to a commune called Humahuaca in Argentina where he meets Aliza’s assistant and is given Aliza’s manuscript. All the while, Julio’s wife returns to her family after a fight about Julio leaving the US. At the commune, Julio reads parts of the manuscript meant to be the ending of Aliza’s tetralogy on the elements of the earth. The novel seems to parallel the life of Aliza, though she was insistent her writing is not memoir. Along the way, Julio tries to fill and understand the space of Aliza’s passing by meeting another one of her assistants, Sarapura, who helped Aliza transcribe some of her writing into another manuscript titled Dictionary of Loss. With the two manuscripts, Julio returns home trying to determine the meanings of Aliza’s writing. Though, he keeps on hitting dead ends. That is until he finds out about a man who built a theater in the ruins of a town where an earthquake had destroyed it. In the theater, there are recordings of residents describing their childhoods before war and the earthquake. And in the voices, Julio realizes what to do with the manuscripts, as they weren’t meant to be edited by him, rather they were for him to read. So, he walks a little farther from the theater and buries both manuscripts in the ground.
 
Fonseca creates stories within stories as there are excerpts of Aliza’s novels in Austral. I enjoyed the way he illustrates the parallels between Julio and his journey to Aliza’s narrators, and I enjoyed the feeling that I was excavating a life along with Julio.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​When They Tell You to be Good by Prince Shakur is a memoir about being Black, gay, and struggling with the absence of a father and a mother’s refusal of acceptance. Shakur describes his years of travel to France, the Philippines, Jamaica, South Korea, and throughout the US. It’s in these places where he attends protests, stays with the locals, meets and falls in love, all while trying to understand his place in a family that hates gay people and how he’s meant to deal with the story of his father’s death. In childhood, Shakur’s mother finds his journal which detail his feelings for another boy, which enrages her. Throughout all his travels, Shakur then processes his mother/community’s reaction, both getting close to other men and pulling away when the pain is too much. Shakur’s family is embroiled in a history of violence: his two uncles in Jamaica were shot and killed due to drug disputes, his other uncle in the US was killed by police, and his step father was arrested because of his citizenship status. Near the end, Shakur comes to realize his father is alive in Arizona, where they talk in a diner and part ways knowing their relationship existed only in imagination.
 
Throughout the novel, Shakur pulls in quotes and discusses James Baldwin, W.E.B Du Bois, and Frank B. Wilderson III to contextualize and make meaning out of the horrors that Black communities face. There were moments that felt as if some paragraphs were tangentially related, which sometimes gave a disconnected feeling while reading. Though, on the whole, I felt that Shakur’s synthesis of his life brought an intensity that I was glad to read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5