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Recent Reviews
Molly Wizenberg
Positive Lambda Literary Wizenberg’s voracious reading is on striking display throughout. She cites a dazzling array of sources and references spanning a range of cultures and time periods. The notes and bibliography present an added flourish that the bibliophiles among us will appreciate. Wizenberg’s writerly sensibility animates every page ... Throughout the narrative the writer employs the instruments of fiction to felicitous effect. The periodic description of literal photographs affords an outsider’s glimpse of a moment in time. The short, episodic fragments within each chapter disrupt chronological sequence, quicken pace, and enhance narrative immediacy. But perhaps the most striking literary feature of this memoir is the thematic and symbolic use of astronomy that the title anticipates ... However informed and talented its author, there are some weaknesses in the memoir. Her argument against the born-this-way paradigm is often insightful and provocative, yet it occasionally slips into generalization. At times, it suggests a tendency toward what psychologist Peter Wason calls \'confirmation bias.\' In addition, Wizenberg’s female and nonbinary partners function as secondary characters in a drama whose main focus is the separation and reassembly of participants in a heterosexual marriage ... Fleshing out these female and nonbinary characters would certainly have enriched The Fixed Stars. These caveats notwithstanding, the high quality of the prose, the breadth of intellectual engagement, and the probing honesty of the inquiry render Molly Wizenberg a writer to follow with interest.
Tarryn Fisher
Positive Lambda Literary [A] compelling anthology ... Several features distinguish this collection including the range of experience covered, a uniformly sophisticated attention to language that manages to convey painful truths in cogent creative prose, an unwillingness to settle for pat answers and easy solutions and, finally, the fact that virtually any woman reading this book will find herself or someone she knows if not literally at least metaphorically in its pages ... One clear strength of Burn It Down, then, is its wide-ranging subject matter and ease of reader association ... powerful ... As this urgent anthology reminds us, the time to burn down the systemic edifice of violence, misogyny and the host of other toxic constructs that seek to dominate women’s lives is long overdue.
Lilly Dancyger
Positive Lambda Literary [A] compelling anthology ... Several features distinguish this collection including the range of experience covered, a uniformly sophisticated attention to language that manages to convey painful truths in cogent creative prose, an unwillingness to settle for pat answers and easy solutions and, finally, the fact that virtually any woman reading this book will find herself or someone she knows if not literally at least metaphorically in its pages ... One clear strength of Burn It Down, then, is its wide-ranging subject matter and ease of reader association ... powerful ... As this urgent anthology reminds us, the time to burn down the systemic edifice of violence, misogyny and the host of other toxic constructs that seek to dominate women’s lives is long overdue.
Sara Stridsberg, Trans. by Deborah Bragan-Turner
Positive Lambda Literary It must be said that Valerie is not for the faint of heart or the squeamish ... And some readers may be daunted by the non-linear structure and certain narrative indeterminacies. Still, the novel commends itself for the lyricism of its prose, the urgency of its momentum and the poignancy of its depiction of an almost forgotten radical who managed to overcome terrible obstacles to try, however misguidedly, to express the rage of a generation.
Liza Wieland
Positive Lambda Literary Lisa Wieland begins her novelistic account of the life of lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishop with a dream. This literary strategy introduces readers from the outset to the trance-like world of the novel in which reverie, memory, and fantasy mingle freely. Stylistically, Wieland elects to omit quotation marks, and her liberal use of interior monologue as well as the decision to blend biographical incidents with fictional accounts seem designed to produce a phantasmagoric effect ... a high-wire propulsive fictional account ... some readers may be put off by Wieland’s fictional liberties or by the appropriation of parts of the poet’s work ... Still one must commend the originality and ambitiousness of Paris, 7. A.M; Wieland’s fascinating effort does provide an interesting new take on a beloved cultural figure.
Nicola Griffith
Positive Lambda literary In the first ten pages of Nicola Griffith’s latest novel, thirty-something narrator Mara Tagarelli’s wife of fourteen years announces the end of their marriage, Mara starts a new relationship with an old friend, and she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis ... An unusual plot twist involving serial killers and a string of hate crimes enables Griffith to explore again the grey area between the real and imagined. Afraid that she will be the next victim, Mara buys a gun and says to herself, I think I’m being hunted. Or haunted ... The world of Nicola Griffith’s So Lucky is governed by ableist misconception and ignorance, but it is also marked by hope and human connection ... It’s a narrative that at once informs, confronts, puzzles and engages. I have little doubt that readers who take it up will be rewarded.