RaveFull StopIn her debut story collection, Kathryn Scanlan’s short, experimental fictions decontextualize, shock, and remain linguistically inventive ... Scanlan’s attention to the minutiae of the sentence is immediately apparent in her short, experimental fictions. The wiry language is textured and cutting ... The precision in Scanlan’s prose renders her objects alien and strange, and the strangeness opens them up to greater scrutiny ... These widowed images, shaped by Scanlan’s markedly unique prose, often come together to create something abrasive, unexpected, and shocking ... Scanlan’s stories of defamiliarized people, places, and actions are a part of this extended lineage, a literature of the object. She is a writer who disposes of the forest for the trees ... We are all the more at the mercy of writers like Scanlan who provide new ways of seeing what has already been seen.
Joshua Rivkin
PositiveEntropyRivkin, a poet himself, does not shrink away from the required speculation, nor does he approach it with embarrassment or apology. His writing about Twombly has, at its center, a deeply personal and, subsequently, moral character to it that extends beyond academic interest, and into visceral desperation ... In other projects this sort of intimate attachment and personal desire to understand the subject could pose a danger to objectivity and the facts, but in a project like Chalk, where the facts are spread so thin, Rivkin’s preference is what makes the book work. He is meticulous in tracking down and interrogating the entire pool of available research, presenting it to the reader in clear, precise prose ... The book is a biography of Cy Twombly, but at the same time it is overlaid by a sort of memoir, the story of an author who, in searching out the cherished secrets of a private life and its work, learns something about himself. This sort of overlay, memoir over biography, is itself reminiscent of the sort of mixed-medium work Twombly was interested in in life ... It’s as if the readers, alongside the author, are seeking to solve Twombly, to understand what motivated him and how he saw the world.
Matthew Vollmer
RaveEntropyThe fragments that make up Permanent Exhibit by Matthew Vollmer read like memoir, like essays, like poetry. They are unconventional, short, and punchy, imitating the lexicon of contemporary internet discourse while sharpening the rhetorical edges to enhance the language’s poetic qualities ... The character of the narrator is fully fleshed, endearing and quirky ... The bank of human experience Vollmer draws from is not limited to contemporary absurdity. Many of the essays are culled from Vollmer’s memories, American mythologies, and oral histories. The essays feel as if they were written outside of any particular time or context ... The reader is left with the sense of the narrator as a sort of bicycling spirit, in motion through the world, carefully attentive to it, but detached ... He handles the political and the religious in the way good literature has long treated such subjects: as absurd, but strangely comforting, side-effects of our humanity ... The essays in Permanent Exhibit are in equal parts funny and devastating.
Roque Larraquy, Trans. by Heather Cleary
RaveFull Stop\"...the novel is not concerned with excoriating particular bad actions, and it would cheapen the text to read it as a mere dystopian warning against particular medical experimentation. The doctors’ cavalier attitude toward their patients’ potential suffering and their willingness to experiment with human bodies illustrates Larraquy’s broader conviction that our capacity for violence is more readily flexible than we like to believe ... The book is unsettling in its depiction of severed bodies, merciless characters, and ominous dreamscapes. Creating this sense of disturbance seems to be a part of Larraquy’s artistic intent. By unmooring the reader, he creates a reading experience that allows for shock in the face of violence, an increasingly difficult task for an artist. Juxtaposing two disparate stories allows the form to match the disconcerting content ... Heather Cleary does a glorious job at capturing the nuance and the comedy of Larraquy’s language ... By tempering even the darkest of moments of the story with grand metaphors, scathing interiority, and the comically absurd, Larraquy pulls the rug out from under the reader’s despair, humanizing the seemingly inhuman cruelty of its characters.\
