​The Kenyon Review Spring 2023 is a collection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations which heavily focused on translations edited by Jennifer Croft, Jeremy Tiang, and Anton Hur. Overall, I thought it was a decent issue, and there were some wacky stories, such as ‘Tumbleweed’ by Ao Omae and translated by Emily Balistrieri which follows the life of a movie star tumbleweed who had once been a person. Another strange story was ‘The Aspiration for Cha-Ka-Ta-Pa’ by Bae Myung-Hoon and translated by Sung Ryu which is about a futuristic time where people go to a library to be immersed in life of the 2020’s and the language/spelling is not like I’ve seen before. There were two stories that I enjoyed which were ‘A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad’ by Sam J. Miller and ‘Two-Headed Dog’ by J. T. Sutlive. The first story features a town in which people fear bear-men who come in at night and eat the villagers, but it turns out that the speaker realizes they’re one of the bear-men. And the second story is about two men, one American who teaches English, the other a Japanese man who works construction/clean-up after a tsunami. The two men are gay and grow close and have an on/off relationship. And I enjoyed the subtlety of the emotions between the two when one of them grieves the loss of his brother in the tsunami. Overall, I enjoyed the short stories, albeit they were a little weird, but didn’t connect too much with the poetry.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​Dryland Issue 11 is a collection of poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and interviews focusing on the people and experiences of South Central LA. There were a few poems that I enjoyed, particularly, ‘We’re Still Too Close to Mexico, Still so Far from God’ by Antonia Silva, ‘Watching the Sunrise from the Second Story’ by Angel Cerritos, ‘A Car Crash is not a Poem’ by Lupita Limón Corrales, ‘Amá Teaches Me How to Whistle’ by Moncho Alvarado, and ‘Newlywed in a Pandemic’ by Samantha Rivas. I also enjoyed the nonfiction piece, ‘My Dad Who Bakes Bread’ by Cecilia Caballero because of how it ties their family history to food and how that changes and alters how they see the world. I enjoyed the issue overall, though found the short fiction to—at times—be a little too simplistic. (Note: Dryland was renamed to sin cesar after this issue.)
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​How to Ruin Everything by George Watsky is a collection of essays chronicling the adventures, mishaps, and travels of a musician on the edge of success. There are moments in India, Canada, and San Francisco, which all highlight the precarious and sometimes grubby nature of Watsky’s situations. It was interesting to read how Watsky was able to get by before he made it big in music, and how he kept on persisting.
 
Though, the essays felt like they followed a more conventional way of storytelling, which felt somewhat hollow. Yes, it was interesting to read about the weird travels and stoner moments, but it didn’t feel like it went beyond those moments to synthesize or draw anything more. Maybe the essays didn’t need to be anything more than they were, and after all, it erred on the side of jokes and humor. Overall, it was interesting to see the trajectory and situations Watsky got into and how he was able to overcome them.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​The Best American Short Stories 2011 is a collection of short stories selected by Geraldine Brooks. The stories range from a scifi story about a love drug to a whole town hibernating every winter. There are some stories that stick out boldly such as ‘The Sleep’ by Caitlin Horrocks, ‘Out of Body’ by Jennifer Egan, ‘Phantoms’ by Steven Millhause, and ‘Dog Bites’ by Ricardo Nuila. Though, I was underwhelmed by the more well-known authors in this collection such as Joyce Carol Oates and George Saunders. Oates’s story focuses on a daughter who can’t identify her mother’s body, and while an interesting premise, I didn’t enjoy the voice. It wasn’t as vibrant or as specific as other authors. And George Saunders’s story about the love drug opened too quickly and the drug names/scenes fell too easily within scifi tropes for it to land or for me to take it seriously. Though, I think ‘Out of Body’ was a gem in the way it dealt with suicide, friendships, college, and relationships. It was also interesting to see that within the Contributor notes, many of the stories came directly from personal experience.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​Granta: Conflict Issue 160 is a collection of essays, fiction, memoir, photography, and poetry focusing on the themes of war and conflict. It mainly resides and contemplates the war in Ukraine and how that affects the people and places there. The stories and essays are about fasting, divorce, mental illness, assault, and moments of turmoil. The harrowing accounts of Ukrainian citizens in ‘Letters from Ukraine’ by Lindsey Hilsum displays the humanity and terror that is currently occurring. I was also drawn in by the narrative Suzanne Scanlon brings in ‘The Moving Target of Being’ which is urgent and frank. It contemplates the struggles of having a mental illness and checking into a psychiatric hospital. The issue looks at the victims of what war and conflict can create, and how each person deals with it differently.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​The October 2005 issue of Poetry contains mostly mediocre poems with a few shining lights. This issue felt like it relied too heavily on poems that fit within rigid rhyming schemes (which isn’t in itself bad, but it more or less felt stale). Though, I thoroughly enjoyed the poems by J.D. Whitney and Amit Majmudar. I was particularly fond of the poem ‘The Miscarriage’ by Amit Majmudar which ended on the lines, “our bodies folded shut our bodies closed/around hope like a book preserving petals/a book we did not open till the morning when/we found hope dry and brittle but intact”.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​Searching for Sylvie Lee is a novel by Jean Kwok which focuses on the disappearance and death of the character Sylvie Lee in the Netherlands. It is split into three narratives: the mother, Amy who is the sister, and Sylvie Lee before she goes missing. I found the threads of Asian themes worked well to show the alienation and distancing that Asians face in other countries. And I felt that the story was elegant in continuing to hold tension about Sylvie’s death up until the last moments. The reports, phone calls, messages, and emails felt natural in the novel and worked to vary the way the story was told. I enjoyed the drama, suspense, and action that existed, but I felt there were a few things that didn’t work as well.
 
First, I think that the thread that follows the mother is too static and acts to slow down and work against the narrative. For the majority of the story, up until the last chapter where the mother is the narrator, nothing happens to her or there isn’t a driving force for her. I think Kwok may have also realized this too as the chapters with the mother are barely three pages long each. There isn’t much ground covered in those moments, and so I didn’t feel personally attached to the character. And while I realize that she can’t speak English well, I didn’t think the intentional use of improper grammar worked to enliven the character. If anything, the grammar forced the mother character into an Asian stereotype. I would’ve liked to either have seen more of the mother in moments with Willem or her own struggles, or taken her narrative thread out altogether. The only thing that would require reworking is her reveal about her affair with Willem, but that could just be added in as dialogue.
 
I had initially enjoyed the sayings that all the characters used that acted as direct metaphors to the situations, but I felt that there were far too many. The metaphors lost all their subtly and felt far too heavy-handed. For example, the lines, “’You guys are bad influences. Those who associate with dogs get fleas,’” are redundant even though one is a metaphor. It would make sense to me if only a single character said these lines, but the grandmother, mother, Amy, and Sylvie all say them at one point, and so it felt like their meanings were deluded.
 
Overall, I enjoyed the suspense and the drama that unfolded in the novel. Generally, the weaving of the narratives held up, and I found myself reading that last hundred pages in a sprint. Though, the novel doesn’t come without its faults, which I felt worked to slow down the pace and box in certain characters.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​In the Paris Review Issue 237 writers grapple with the existential and the absurd, sometimes to great effect, and other times missing the mark. I was particularly drawn to the first story, ‘The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra’ by Kenan Orhan, where a garbage collector begins to collect instruments after the city cracks down on people’s possessions. The absurdity builds until he not only collects all the instruments for an orchestra, but also all the players. At the end, the police find out what he was doing, and so locked him up with objects that the speaker believed had also been arrested. It was a story reminiscent of dystopian novels but had a twinge of humor.
 
Another highlight included Ada Limón’s poem ‘Power Lines’ in which a power line crew works to remove a tree in the way. And its final lines worked beyond the piece, “Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump / where what felt like wisdom once was.”
 
And the third piece I felt worked elegantly was Joy Katz’s creative non-fiction essay ‘Tennis is the Opposite of Death: A Proof’, which confronted a father’s death and Katz’s mortality. Its interplay with memory, tennis, and the father-daughter relationship held an emotional urgency.
 
However, while those pieces were my highlights, there were some moments that felt incongruous and sometimes didn’t work. I was particularly hesitant with the subject matter of ‘Rainbow Rainbow’ by Lydia Conklin in which a pair of teenagers fawn over an adult. It then broaches uncomfortable territory when one of the teenagers is fondled by the adult. And while I’m sure Conklin meant well in the conveyance of the adult realizing what she did was wrong, but it didn’t have a strong enough impact to excuse the actions beforehand (and maybe that was intended). Though, the damage of the adult didn’t seem to register or truly play out for the characters, and so it felt like a piece whose characters thought nothing but positively about the encounter.
 
I was also left underwhelmed by the story ‘The Lottery in Almeria’ by Camille Bordas, which had an initially interesting premise with the lottery and the inherited house of the father. Though, I felt that it fizzled out when the relationship with the sister was not really vibrant. I thought that the textbook writer writing the beginning of the story worked well, though it didn’t seem to follow through in the end.
 
There were some stunners, but also some stories that didn’t work too well for me.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​The Spring 2021 issue of American Short Fiction contains seven short stories from such writers as Anthony Veasna So to Whitney Collins. While this wasn’t a themed issue, I noticed that about half of the stories focused on the loss or vacuum of an absent father. It was interesting to see the way each character approached and processed loss differently.
 
Though, for me I think the best story was ‘How Soon Until We’re Deadly?’ by Kevin Moffett. It detailed the intervening moments after his father’s death, and the karate dojo he attended to fill that fatherly role. The voice of the story was vibrant, with moments of humor sprinkled in. The speaker, at the point of writing the story, had already been able to reflect and understand what happened, which gave a strong anchor for me to hold onto.
 
I didn’t particularly enjoy other stories in the issue. I felt that ‘Bitten’ by Holiday Reinhorn was too surface level and relied too much on pop culture. And ‘The Get-Go’ by Elizabeth McCracken had awkward sentences and didn’t bring anything fresh to the conversation of loss.
 
Final Rating: 3/5