PanPopMatters... what the late Michael Crichton might have written if he had grown up in Argentina and fancied himself a high postmodernist ... a bland novel stuck between genres and ideas, switching between timelines ... It should be fascinating, and at times it is; it is beautifully written, the language limpid and poetic when it needs to be, sparse and rugged when the scene calls for it. But Dark Constellations is ultimately a mess of references, of tried stories, and old tropes pining in their mashedness for pastiche, but never coalescing into anything as artful and intoxicating as the mystery plant at the novel\'s heart ... two and a half novellas, only one of them remotely intriguing, thrown together in an e-doc and emailed directly to the printer ... the characters are lifeless and drab ... the worst of slipstream and of attempted postmodern experimentality at a time when attempts to be the Pynchon or Nabokov of the \'60s are, frankly, boring. The novel does nothing—says nothing unsaid by every movie, TV show, comic book, Twitter thread, and TED Talk since the Patriot Act—and will be a critical hit all the same.
G. Willow Wilson
PositiveWorld Literature TodayThrough Fatima and Hassan’s complementary world-making strategies—one narrative and mythical, the other cartographical—Wilson reveals the limits of orthodoxy and the violence of calcified belief, opening up spaces for an exciting critique of war, power, religion, and history. The Bird King is an important, magical story of a world in which Islam and Christianity contend for global dominance and offers a vibrant reconsideration of the individual’s place in the global circulations of power in the post-9/11 world.
Nora Ikstena, Trans. by Margita Gailitis
PositivePopMatters\"Nora Ikstena\'s Soviet Milk is an important and touching portrait of motherhood, daughterhood, and mental health in Soviet Latvia, but also a timely meditation in our contemporary moment on patriarchy, the Soviet Union, and possibilities of mother-daughter/female homosocial relationships. It is also beautifully translated by Margita Gailitis, who attends well to Anglophone audiences by occasionally preserving phrases from the Latvian original (especially when songs and political slogans are quoted) and pairing them side-by-side with English translations. Galaitis and Peirene Press have brought an important work of contemporary European literature at the intersection of feminist and post-Soviet writing to a broader audience, and in doing so have introduced a powerful new voice to the English-language readers.\
Jamil Jan Kochai
PositivePopMatters\"99 Nights in Logar is a fine novel. It doesn\'t always flow smoothly, but Kochai (and his editors) have clearly put a lot of work into both the sentence-level craft and the larger structure of chapters and sections ... [There] are excellent moments when Kochai shines as a storyteller, but he also excels at voicing the Americanisms of an Afghan-American 12-year-old and how these come into conflict with his Afghan family who have stayed in Afghanistan. 99 Nights in Logar is, in a few words, finely crafted but not perfect; and this is a good thing ... Kochai\'s first novel is a good book, but it\'s not incredible; it\'s memorable, and represents a unique and important entry in the increasing literature of the Middle Eastern diaspora in the US, documenting how American-backed wars and conflict have spread into the days and nights of children the world over.\
Carmen Maria Machado
RaveWorld Literature TodayCarmen Maria Machado’s debut short-story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, reveals a new herald for the New Weird, marking Machado as one of the genre’s foremost voices... Machado’s tales rejoice in the body and its pleasures, embracing sex as weird, arousing, messy, yet altogether human ... With her debut collection, she molds genre, form, tone, and subject like a master of the craft, wielding the most beautiful, haunting prose this year ... With stories like these, Machado’s oeuvre simultaneously defies and attracts categorization ... Machado is a revolution. She is at once a funny, dark, terrifying, uplifting anti-Lovecraft who observes in the everyday oppressions of heteropatriarchy and late capitalism what is truly horrifying, nonetheless finding release in the dark’s nooks and crannies.
