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

​Shadowings by Lafcadio Hearn is a collection of Japanese legends, songs, girl names, and essays focused particularly on dreams. In the legends, one features a samurai who returns to his first wife one night only to discover that that she had died from his absence. Another features a man who must ride the dead body of a woman in order for her not to haunt him. There’s an essay on cicadas and how the Japanese infuse them into literature. Then an essay on the etiquette and minutia of girl names which catalogue hundreds of names and their meanings. There’s an essay on old songs and the contexts from which they come from. Finally, there are an assortment of essays ranging from how the author levitated in his dreams, to why we fear ghosts, to words he had dictated from a book in his dream. There are weird moments, though I appreciate the amount of detail Hearn goes into on how he categorizes and explains the names, songs, and cicadas.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck are two novellas focusing on the lives of people in California. The Pearl is about an indigenous couple whose child is stung by a scorpion, so they request the aid of a doctor. However, the doctor only treats patients who can pay, and the family, Kino and Juana, are poor. To see if they can find money to pay, they go out into the bay and dive for pearls where Kino discovers one the size of an egg. From then on, people of their village and the town try to steal the pearl or kill them. The doctor returns to help the sick baby, but is really out to get the pearl. Kino first tries to sell it to the pearl buyers in the town, but they give him a terribly low price, so he decides to go to a city in the north to sell it. Before they go, their home is burned down, and they must evade trackers until they reach a cliff. Kino understands they will soon find him and Juana, so Kino decides to kill the trackers at night. Kino crawls down from the cliff, and attacks the men, but a rifle goes off in the direction of the cliff. Once Kino kills the three trackers, he returns to Juana and their hidden child, but find that the child has been shot in the head. Kino and Juana return to their village where they lost their home, boat, and now child. They arrive to the shore and, knowing that the pearl has only brought with it evil, throw it back into the water.
 
The Red Pony is about a boy, Jody, who lives with his family on a ranch. One day, his father gets him a pony for him to take care of. However, when it rains, the pony comes down with an illness it can never recover from. All the while, the ranch hand, Billy, reassures Jody the pony will survive. Following this, an old man arrives to their ranch claiming he lived there before and plans to stay there. Jody’s father, Carl, is reluctant to house the man and tells him he can only stay the night. The next morning, one of their oldest horses is gone with the man. After seeing how well Jody treated the pony in its illness, Carl decides to breed one of their horses and give the colt to Jody to care for. Jody takes a female horse to another ranch where it’s breed, and Jody impatiently waits for the colt to be born. One morning, Billy wakes up Jody telling him the horse is about to give birth. Though, as Billy is prepping, he realizes the colt is turned the wrong way around, and must kill the mother horse and cut open its belly to allow the colt to survive. Finally, later on at the ranch, Jody’s mother gets a letter saying their grandfather plans to arrive. Jody is excited while Carl dislikes the grandfather’s stories because he’s told them many times before. Thus, Carl believes the old man is living in the past. In the end, the grandfather explains that the stories weren’t exactly what he wanted to convey, but rather the feeling of being a leader of a strong team.
 
These two stories were striking in the way they rendered setting, dialogue, and people with precision. I was drawn into the tragedies of both stories, and liked the way The Pearl zoomed out in time in the end to frame the story as a legend. The Red Pony also does something interesting in that each section felt like its own small story, and I wasn’t sure if some of the characters/ideas would come back. What happened to the old man who stole the horse and rode into the ridge above the ranch? Does the colt survive after its birth, and why doesn’t it pop up later on? There are a lot of things left unresolved, but I felt that it worked. I really enjoyed this read although both stories described loss after loss without much reprieve.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is an essay focusing on the implications and history of women in fiction. It details the types of struggles women have had to exist within in the literature landscape, imagining the lengths with which Jane Austen had to hide her manuscripts, the views of men on women writing, and the difficulties of the past and present. Though, there are also other calls to actions and reassurances for writers, in which she writes, “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” Or, “Perhaps a mind that us purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.” And finally, “Therefore, I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” It’s an encouraging read seeing as Woolf mentions that women, given a hundred years would come into themselves in fiction. Seeing the landscape now, this seems to have become realized (though, not fully so). The thesis of Woolf’s argument is that if a person has the material means (i.e. a stable income, a private space) as well as drawing from both their feminine and masculine sides, then a writer can effectively become renowned. And while Woolf does mention many writers (including herself), come from wealth, it’s hard to reckon with the fact that other writers do not have those resources. How does one simply afford five hundred dollars a year (about nine thousand dollars today), without spending most of their time working and less of their time writing?
 
Final Rating: 4/5