Tajja Isen
Tajja Isen is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and voice actor. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Longreads, BuzzFeed, The Globe and Mail, Broadly, Electric Literature, Bitch, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor for Catapult and an Editorial Fellow at The Walrus magazine.
Recent Reviews
RaveDefectorIs there a story writers love to tell more than the one about how we became ourselves? ... Julie Buntin’s sophomore novel, Famous Men, is an audacious entry into this canon ... It is a testament to Buntin’s skill that despite these familiar hallmarks, the dynamic between Will and Nathaniel feels original and consistently electric ... Famous Men sets up, and then subverts, our expectations of the artistic coming-of-age narrative.
Aja Gabel
PositiveThe Rumpus\"Music structures the novel at multiple levels, lending The Ensemble both a form and language. Divided into four parts, each portion cycles through the voices of two or three characters in a manner akin to musical solos ... The vocabulary of music is also woven into the novel’s diction, but with patchier success. While transposing the language of music into different contexts can offer moments of unexpected beauty, Gabel’s overreliance on the trope can also result in inscrutable images ... This is where the novel truly shines—in its musings on the glue that binds the group. Gabel peppers physical descriptions with moments of telling uncertainty ... Like the best narratives of ambition, The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit. But there’s no schadenfreude here—more than just conveying the scandalous thrill of seeing what it takes to make it, Gabel’s sensitive depiction of relationships tempers that thrill with the poignancy of loss and the recognition that success often requires the pruning out of what is most meaningful.\
