The Brooklyn Rail

Holly Black & A.G. Slatter

By Yvonne C. Garrett

I wish I’d had Holly Black and A.G. (Angela) Slatter’s books to read when I was growing up. As it is, I’ve recently devoured nearly everything they’ve written.

Steve Yarbrough’s Stay Gone Days

By Joseph Peschel

Steve Yarbrough&rsquop;s eighth novel, Stay Gone Days, follows the lives of two girls, the Cole sisters, Ella and Caroline, who grow up in Loring, Mississippi. After high school, they go their separate ways, and, for the most part, stay gone.

Matthew Vollmer’s This World Is Not Your Home

By Zach Schwab

This World Is Not Your Home ultimately coheres as a collection committed above all to exploring the ramifications of emotional candor, a task it approaches in subtle ways that can alternately charm, haunt, and leave one wanting.

In Conversation

Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov with Camilo Trumper

By Camilo Trumper

Eric and Terri immersed themselves in a project to document the “walls of Santiago”—turning their expertise as interdisciplinary scholars of culture, politics, gender, literature, and history onto a political revolution playing out before them on the streets and walls of the city they were making home.

In Conversation

Jerry Stahl with Adele Bertei

By Adele Bertei

At a cultural moment when the tides thunder that white men shouldn’t dance, Jerry Stahl takes a brave two-step into the belly of the beast—the Holocaust. Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust finds Stahl confronting his personal demons from inside the disturbing frame of Holocaust tourism.

Jordan Castro: The Novelist

By Scott Cheshire

For any computer user the opening sentence in Jordan Castro’s compact, brilliant, and very funny debut novel The Novelist is determinedly accurate and not a little uncanny: “I opened my laptop, still waiting for my morning tea to steep, and tried to type my password three times rapidly before getting it right, my waking fingers clicking with the determination of a machine.“ It is those “clicking” fingers and that particular “machine” I find slightly unsettling, a quiet but bracing nudge that a user might be as “machine” as its computer.

In Conversation

Edie Meidav with Andrea Scrima

I read your new book, Another Love Discourse, in a state of high emotional alert, and when I finished, I went back to the beginning and started again. It’s a rare luxury to read a book twice, but I felt I needed to revisit the narrator’s self-scrutinies, the overall process of transformation she undergoes throughout the telling, because I was so mesmerized by the form the first time around that I was afraid I’d missed something along the way.