PositiveFull Stop... it isn’t the ghosts or the workplace harassment that provides the jump scares in Where the Wild Ladies Are: it’s the material reminder of conformity and meaningless, textureless commodity and the erasure of the local ... While these stories — in folktale fashion — seem at first to float just above temporal specificity, Matsuda tethers them to the contemporary moment. But this temporal clarity does not come from women’s ascendence in the workplace or their ability to live independently. Rather, Matsuda punctures the folktale serenity and brings us into the now through references to the cruelties of global capitalism and western cultural hegemony.
Jenn Shapland
PositiveFull StopThis fragmented construction (the book is split into 80 short fragments, or \'chapters\') isn’t simply an aesthetic choice; it also works as a crucial comment on the genre of women’s life narratives and the construction of self ... fragmentation and queer reading and research practices are a critical collapsing of epistemology and ontology ... Shapland finds this epistemological and ontological collapse in attempting to make sense of the material and the written through theorizing biography as genre itself ... as My Autobiography posits...habits of readerly projection aren’t inherently good or bad. Whether it’s my projection onto Shapland or Shapland’s projection of queer love onto those initial letters between McCullers and Schwarzenbach, My Autobiography illustrates that what matters is the kind of space for creation these projections open.
Charlotte Wood
RaveFull-StopWood understands the nuances of misogyny ... To some, The Natural Way of Things, as an allegorical novel, might seem a bit on the nose in terms of how it tackles misogyny, particularly slut-shaming...But this frankness is key. Wood’s novel becomes much more urgent if it isn’t read as an allegory or as a dystopian world ... What sets The Natural Way of Things apart, what makes it a truly urgent read is that it is not an allegory and it is not a dystopian novel: it is a reality. As such, The Natural Way of Things, a work that takes the reality of misogyny and toxic cultural notions about women’s sexuality and very bluntly bulldozes those ideas, is exactly what we should be reading right now.
Daniel Saldaña París, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
RaveFull StopTo describe the plot of Among Strange Victims is to do a disservice to Saldaña París, as few can bring the mundane life (and not-so-mundane musings) of protagonist Rodrigo Saldívar to such humorous and engaging levels ... Saldaña París eases readers into suspending disbelief through his wonderfully sharp, thoughtful prose.
