​Copper Nickel Issue 40 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and essays. There were a few poems I particularly liked, such as, ‘Man Bowls a Perfect Game with Father’s Ashes Inside the Ball’ by Matt Donovan, and ‘Spring Snow’ by David Hopson. Though, the sand-out piece was ‘Ritual’ by Yang Hao, in which a man helps dispose of dead bodies in the near future. Though, the rest of the pieces didn’t feel as full as the ones mentioned above.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​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

​Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is a novel about a fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who has become fed up with his life and his father in Tokyo, so he runs away. While he doesn’t know where he plans on ending up, along the way he meets a girl, Sakura, on the bus. One night, when he comes to and finds blood on his shirt, he calls up Sakura to ask for help in trying to figure out what happened. Eventually, Kafka finds a library in Takamatsu where he meets the assistant, Oshima, and the main librarian, Miss Saeki. Because Kafka is worried that he killed someone, he tries to lay low at the library. Miss Saeki is an elusive woman who had lost the love of her life when she was younger and was stuck in time, while it’s later revealed that Oshima is trans. Kafka stays at the library, going back and forth from his hotel until Oshima offers a room in the library for him. As the room is getting prepared, Oshima takes Kafka to his family’s old cabin with a forest that two soldiers had once gotten lost in. Then, when Kafka assists Oshima in his library duties and sleeps, on some nights a ghost of a young Miss Saeki sits in the room gazing at a painting. Miss Saeki had once been a singer, producing only one song, from the time her love went off to university, soon to be killed. She had disappeared for some time, which was when Kafka believe that her and his father had him before she ran away with his sister. Eventually, Kafka has sex with both the young Miss Saeki and the older Miss Saeki, falling in love with her. When Kafka learns that the police are after him due to his father’s death, Oshima sends him back to the cabin. At the cabin, Kafka decides to walk into the forest so far that he meets the soldiers that were lost. It turns out they were guarding an entrance to a town that seemed to be in the spiritual world. Upon arriving in the town, Kafka meets both Miss Saeki’s, with the older one telling him he needed to leave before the entrance closed. So with a torn heart, Kafka leaves and returns to the library, a new man, and decides to return back home. The whole time Kafka remembers what his father had said to him, how he would kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. All of which seemed to come true.
 
In addition to Kafka, a second storyline emerges with an older man, Mr. Nakata, who has both lost his memory and is mentally challenged. This was due to an event when he was a child where he fell unconscious for three weeks on top of a hill during a school field trip picking mushrooms. After he woke up, Mr. Nagata was different and could never achieve the goals that his family set out for him. Though, the one thing he could do was talk to cats, which he uses to look for a missing cat called Goma. Along the way Mr. Nakata meets other cats who tell him that Goma may have been kidnapped. It’s only when a dog leads Mr. Nagata to a man called Johnnie Walker where he learns that the cats are being killed and their hearts eaten to create a flute that controls living beings. Johnnie Walker goads Mr. Nakata to kill him, though Mr. Nakata is unwilling until one of the friendly cats is about to be killed. Mr. Nakata then stabs the man with a knife, saving Goma and the other cats. However, it turns out that Johnnie Walker is Kafka’s father, which means that Mr. Nakata must leave Tokyo to evade. And while he did tell the police, they didn’t believe him. Along the way out of Tokyo, Mr. Nakata makes fish and leeches fall out of the sky, eventually meeting up with a trucker named Hoshino. They get along well and while Mr. Nakata doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go, they drive to Takamatsu where Mr. Nakata realizes he must find the entrance stone. They take a few days to look for it, and not until a concept called Colonel Sanders points Hoshino in the right direction, do they find it and open it. From there, Mr. Nakata continues to search for what he needs to complete, and only finds it at the library where Kafka had stayed. When they talk with Miss Saeki, Mr. Nakata realizes that she’s the one that he needs to talk to. She enlists Mr. Nakata to burn her life’s writing, all her memories, before she passes away. That day, as Mr. Nakata and Hoshino are back at their apartment, Mr. Nakata dies and it’s up to Hoshino to close the entrance. The two days after, a black cat tells Hoshino he must kill it before it can reach the entrance stone or else. Late at night, Hoshino finds out what it is, which is a white mucous thing that climbs out of Mr. Nakata’s dead mouth. Hoshino closes the entrance stone, kills the thing, and eventually makes his return back to his job.
 
Murakami weaves so many fantastical and magical things into the modern world it feels truly surreal. There are characters that take on the faces of brands, talking cats, and ghost sex. The novel also isn’t afraid to break form as in the use of interviews for Mr. Nakata’s unconsciousness, the use of the boy named Crow as Kafka’s inner voice/strength, or when the narrative switches to a second person POV during the intimate moments with Miss Saeki. The taboo nature of the sex between mother and son is explicitly referred to when Kafka reveals the curse his father put on him when talking to Oshima, which made the narrative all the more aware of itself. Because Kafka is initially horror-stricken with this curse and the inevitability of it being played out speaks to the way destiny and fate are referred to in the novel. And while I’m not trans, it felt that the reveal of Oshima only worked to deepen his character rather than him being used as a prop. In part, because Kafka is a boy, the language around women does seem a little misogynistic, though makes sense for his character. And while there weren’t definitive answers to if Kafka and/or Mr. Nakata killed Kafka’s father, why the kids in the forest went unconscious, if Kafka’s father was also Johnnie Walker, or if the town was a spiritual middle world, I felt satisfied with leaving those questions unanswered.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada is a novel about three workers who all have strange jobs that soon become meaningless. One works as a paper shredder, another works as a copy editor for factory documents, and the third studies the moss growing around the factory. Their lives are surrounded by the meaningless tasks that are set out before them. The man who studies the moss, at one point put on a moss hunting event for children, where a grandfather and boy joined in. The day after, they ask the man to read and edit the kid’s school project about unique animals within the factory. The man reluctantly agrees, and eventually after reading about the Factory Shag, the man decides to photograph them. At the same time, the paper shredder is asked to take a day off, so she walks to a bridge on the factory premises and meets the man who studies moss.
 
The novel relies on its strangeness to propel the narrative along. Questions that arise from its strangeness were What does the factory actually do? What do their jobs have to do with anything? Why are there so many strange creatures around? Did the paper shredder woman actually turn into a bird in the end? I particularly enjoyed the kid’s report on the Washer Lizards, and generally got the vibe of the slightly surreal, slightly macabre aspect of modern workplace life. Though quite different, the workplace strangeness reminds me of the show Severance, in that the purpose of what the workers do is obscured, seemingly done for no other reason than to give people a salary. The Factory also jumps POVs between the three characters and I found it worked particularly well when the two workers met on the bridge. The novel overall was a fun and quick read.
 
Overall Rating: 4.5/5

​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

​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