Yvonne C. Garrett
Yvonne C. Garrett (she/her) holds an MLIS, an MFA-Fiction, two MAs (NYU), a Ph.D. (with a dissertation focused on women in Punk), and recently completed an M.Div. and Certificate in Chaplaincy (Starr King). She can be found online at theprb.substack.com and at @yvonneprbnyc.bsky.social.
The title of Irenosen Okojie’s new novel comes from the Spanish/Latin American word for a female shaman. Loosely defined as a healer who uses herbs, psychoactive plants, and traditional ritual to heal, induce visions, and provide guidance, curanderas are central to the novel.
In this eco-horror thriller, a young woman, Erin Harper, travels to the rural Oregon town of Faraday, ostensibly on assignment to do a travel story.
July/August 2025Books
Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
In her latest effort, Caroline Fraser explores why, during the 1970s through the 1990s, the Pacific Northwest produced more serial killers than any other place in the United States.
Ali Smith’s new novel is set in a possible future—one that seems horrifyingly possible in our current world. Told primarily in the voice of the young nonbinary Bri (short for Briar/Brice), the story is one of brutal oppression, state surveillance, but also hope.
As Winterson writes, ghosts have existed as long as we have been able to imagine them. Religion and the Enlightenment didn’t erase them, but instead simply shifted the ways we speak of ghosts in the West—often showing up in late-night storytelling, films, and fiction.
Prolific novelist and critic Francine Prose’s first memoir is a powerful example of deeply personal, political history written in her usual stellar prose.
Siân Hughes’s debut novel Pearl is a gorgeous exploration of the nature of grief and memory and how both can intertwine to create our perspectives and shape our relationships.
There’s a special pleasure in picking up a new Kevin Barry book. I know I’m likely in for a wild ride of a story and sentences that force the English language into strange and musical shapes.
Picking up twenty years after Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s Long Island continues themes of longing, missed connections, and the destructive silences between families and lovers.
When a whale dies out in the ocean, its body often sinks to the ocean floor where it becomes what’s known as “whale fall”—a sudden, concentrated, long-term food source for ocean scavengers. Elizabeth O’Connor’s debut novel begins with a whale beaching on an isolated island off the coast of Wales.
At the center of the novel is a question: what does it mean to center one’s work on slowing our collective hurtling toward destruction? For the four Flattery sisters, that work takes different shapes but each is positioned as an “alternative.”
I’m not quite sure what I was expecting when I read that Kelly Link’s first novel (after many stunningly good short story collections) would be called The Book of Love. I thought maybe a sharp, lovely, brief book about wild magic and love and life. While this is a sharp and lovely book about all those things, it’s also a terrifying contemplation on grief and loss and death and power.
In this lyrical and moving debut, a young composer wakes up to a strange droning noise in one ear that becomes a diagnosis of Sudden Deafness, and she must come to terms with a pervasive and growing silence. When she receives the diagnosis, the narrator, Eliza, starts a journal: “I kept score of a year in which I was flung suddenly from my own life, only to learn that to see something in its entirety is to be entirely outside of that thing … I took one long walk around myself … I wrote it down—the stark, inescapable facts of a situation.”
A charitable project for the Authors Guild Foundation, most of the stories in this collection are single entries by well-known writers whose diversity is described as “a thumb in the eye of … literary balkanization.” Told over fourteen days from March 31 through April 13, 2020, these are tales told by New Yorkers seemingly unable (or unwilling) to escape the city during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown.
In Maria Hummel’s new novel, two women (Edith and Lacey) form a friendship as children that lasts into adulthood, but at the start of the novel, they’ve been estranged for more than forty years. Chapters shift across time, the novel focusing mostly on the privileged Lacey Crane.
Alderman writes complex novels and her new one, The Future, is a hefty but highly compelling page-turner that pulled me in and kept me reading from the first line. It’s a very dark read but also shot through with humor, sharp satire, compassion, a great love story, and well-wrought prose.
With her usual grace and skill, Sigrid Nunez presents a series of delicate, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, sometimes funny musings on life. There are those who will lazily call this a pandemic novel but it’s so much more than that. Instead, this is a window into the life of a writer, a woman who is both one of “the vulnerables” and a force to be reckoned with.
As Poole states in his preface, “There lives, somewhere in our psyches where it has crouched on its haunches since the earliest human experience, a yearning for the taboo and the terrible.” Using Ray Bradbury’s phrase “dark carnival” throughout to refer to both media productions and the military-Capitalism that structures American lives, Poole claims that while we may want our “dark carnivals” to be places to visit “desired only because we can leave”—we are trapped, “denizen(s) of the dark carnival.”
Although these two novels are very different in tone, focus, structure, and style, they share central themes of the societal structures that attempt to oppress and define women and the powerful magic women can access—though the magic present in each novel derives from very different sources.
This new collection is a great introduction to her work and for those of us already familiar with Hadley, it’s a great addition. Throughout the collection, Hadley spins out character studies of (mostly) women at odds with themselves, their partners, their families, or life in general. Set in different eras and different parts of England, there are commonalities that run like a humming thread connecting these stories into a brilliant whole: love, loss, conflict, and the lies we tell each other and ourselves.
To read Alshammari’s work is to be harshly reminded of the capitalist and Darwinian nature of academia and really, of many cultures including both English/Western culture and the Arabic/Bedouin culture Alshammari describes. People are only useful if they can compete, produce, and for women, reproduce successfully. To be female is, often, to live in a state of shame where others—usually heteronormative cis-gender men—create systems that both reject and control our bodies on every level.
Of course, Moore’s trademark precision prose works throughout to move the story forward and ensure the reader is both laughing and crying—warning: this is a deeply emotional read.
The overturning of Roe V. Wade took a decades-long project by an organized coalition of radicals and mainstream activists, clergy, politicians, and presidents. There are any number of in-depth articles and books detailing this history. What Lauren Rankin provides is a different history: one that focuses on the people doing the street-level activism that helped keep clinics open and helped patients access healthcare.
Cheney’s new collection is less the “horror!” that his publisher hypes and more a combination of wildly post-apocalyptic brutalism and deeply sympathetic studies of people—lost or irreparably harmed by modern life and the punishing ways masculinity is often shaped.
For me, the experience of viewing this installation was immediately reminiscent of my first read of Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Cursed Bread—a slowly rising suffocation mixed with a hint of deep existential dread without clear cause. As Cursed Bread moves through alternating chapters, shifting back and forth through time, there is a slowly accumulating experience of vertiginous panic.
Link’s new collection contains stories that demand rereading with so many layers of meaning they move from brain into blood and bone and back again in a cyclical process.
Margaret Atwood’s first fiction since 2019’s Booker Prize winning The Testaments and her first story collection since Stone Mattress (2014), these fifteen stories are a master class in how to write, a rollicking good time, and a deep exploration of human relationships—the damage we do to each other and the ways we come together.
Asja Bakić writes with rare wit about lust, love, science, the climate disaster, time travel, and even provides a female take on the sufferings of Goethe’s Young Werther.
In 2005 James Wood in The New Yorker wrote, “To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose.” Now eighty-nine, McCarthy’s two new novels—at least on the surface—focus on the tragic relationship between a brother and sister, Bobby and Alicia (Alice) Western. The first, The Passenger, is novel-length and the second (much shorter text), Stella Maris, is structured as a series of therapy sessions between Alicia and her psychiatrist at the psychiatric facility where she has committed herself for the third and tragically final time.
In these two very different works on writing by two very different writers, there is much for fans and for writers alike.
In the 1990s, Daniel Clowes’s wildly creative, darkly funny Eightball comics were a must read.
Emma Donoghue’s new novel explores themes of faith, obedience, isolation, and survival in a harrowing story that is ancient and alien but also holds truths for our own time.
While Meng Jin and Mieko Kawakami are very different writers, and these are two very different books, there are some shared threads, including a deep contemplation on what it means to be human, the terror of isolation and the solace of being alone, and an ongoing questioning of female identity.
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.
Claire Kohda’s debut is a deeply moving contemplation on love, food, art, and what it means to be alive. It’s also a vampire novel.
The Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) is a lunar mare that sits in the Tranquillitatis basin on the moon. It’s the first off-world place ever visited by human beings. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left footprints there. It’s also the location of the first moon colony in Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel.
Writers can learn a lot from reading Atwood: not just the shape of her sentences, the way she moves seamlessly between topics, but also in those moments when she is very specific about process.
These two very different tales share few themes beyond the nascent power of young girls and a characterization of the natural world as essential in understanding our own humanity. Where Booker Prize winner Ben Okri’s (The Famished Road) magically graceful environmental fairy tale is full of light and hope, Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone is rife with gothic body horror and the darkness of the jungle and within ourselves.
Dec/Jan 21–22Books
Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood and Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark
Each of these books presents a master class in craft while also providing a perfectly honed narrative that draws the reader in and won’t let go.
These two very different novels explore issues of race, gender, and the history of white supremacy in the U.S.
I sat on the beach with Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming almost-600 page novel balanced on my knees, deep in his version of 1971 America. But as I dove into wave after wave, I was thinking instead of the glorious sea-infused debut by Mombasa-born Khadija Abdalla Bajaber.
At first pass, these two novels have little in common, but there are some parallels. Both are about a process of change, a shift into adulthood, and the sharp and difficult journey that can be for many of us.
In these three disparate books written by women, there are moments that shock and commonalities that illustrate the importance of diverse voices. In her new collection of essays, Jacqueline Rose writes with her usual precision about violence and its deadly grip on modern life. Black Box is the English translation of Shiori Ito’s groundbreaking account of surviving sexual violence in Japan. And in While Justice Sleeps, political powerhouse Stacey Abrams brings us a complex thriller focused on a young mixed-race woman investigating corruption at the highest levels of the US government.
In her debut, a memoir, Jones catalogues family violence as a part of her remembering; violence becomes a framework and connecting thread for the 13 vignettes that explore her own, her family’s, and her hometown, Myrtle Beach’s troubled and collective past.
In this equally exhausting and well-executed debut, Lauren Oyler turns her sharp critical eye on the world of social media—the lies we tell online and the lies we tell ourselves. Already a respected critic, this is Oyler’s first foray into fiction.
In a culture that is built to support white male voices, the attempt to carve a space as a writer-outsider is incredibly difficult, a task, Salesses argues, made that much more difficult by the traditional workshop structure where the author is “workshopped” while sitting, completely silent, in a room full of other students discussing her work.
In Jarrar’s new book (a memoir), Trump’s rise to power is an undercurrent as, in over more than 200 pages, across decades, time zones, and borders, Jarrar explores what it is to live as an American who is also Palestinian, a woman, and a woman of a certain size who also self-defines as queer. We can all learn a lot from Jarrar: about racism, privilege, oppression, fat-phobia, sexual violence, and the way this country (and others) treats women.
Sayaka Murata’s (Convenience Store Woman, 2019) new novel is a deeply disturbing exploration of one woman’s attempt to try to survive outside cultural norms in Japanese society.
Across some 200 pages, Garza applies a lingual scalpel to the narrative of systemic violence: a narrative enacted on both sides of the border by governments, law enforcement, drug cartels, and the media who sensationalize, erase, or ignore the violence. She
Like any good gothic novel, there is a dark old house full of noises and things that go bump in the night, there are ghosts and there are witches. But these are not malevolent ghosts and the witches are there to resist, to protect, and to balance male violence.
In 2004, Eleanor Suzuki sees Leena Shah in an elevator in their college dorm. For Eleanor, it’s love at first sight (or at least young lust); Leena isn’t so sure. From that moment, we see the development of their friendship, intense love affair, its collapse, and later coincidental meetings that complicate both their lives.
Whenever I read a celebrity memoir, I ask myself, “Why does this story matter? What can readers learn from this?” There has to be more to a celebrity memoir than just tales of sex, drugs, name dropping, fame, and survival. What Valentine provides is not only a thorough accounting of her harrowing childhood, her hard-fought rise to stardom, subsequent collapse and redemption; she provides a window into an important part of rock history.
While offering a slice of punk rock nostalgia around influential punk band X and frontwoman Exene Cervenka, the book also explores racism, sexuality, and the ways society often positions young women as transactional commodities with their worth based on their whiteness, their appearance, and their ability to please men.
In a recent interview, O’Neill focuses on the paradigm of what she calls “watchedness”—the state of watching and being watched; a state many of us find ourselves in right now. The novel’s critique of internet privacy is of course vital and current, but so is the notion that all of us, everywhere are watching and being watched—all the time. Living in a city on lockdown, where we are encouraged to report our neighbors who may not be practicing “safe social distancing” and where we are encouraged to self-isolate, to only connect through technology, makes O’Neill’s critique seem almost soft.
These 10 stories focus on a variety of unrelated characters grappling with loss, violence, sexual jealousy, and the terrible ways technology can be wielded in a data-dependent world.
There is a complex grace to The Glass Hotel that’s often lacking from contemporary fiction, particularly contemporary thriller fiction. It’s not simply Mandel’s deft prose, her ability to write Dickensian networks of coincidence, but her keen observation of human behavior: our fears, our dreams, what drives us, and what might ultimately destroy or save each of us.
Deb Olin Unferth's Barn 8 starts out seemingly as the narrative of two women— but eventually it becomes clear that this book isn’t so much about the human characters but instead about the animals, specifically the hens: long-suffering, much smarter than we give them credit for, abused beyond comprehension, and ultimately transcendent.
Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime By Women Writers is a patriarchy-challenging collection of noir by women. Not all of these tales are told from a woman’s perspective, nor are they all presenting a feminist perspective, but most are wonderfully wrought, chilling tales of revenge, redemption, the evil that men do, and just what these women do about it.
Erin Morgenstern’s new novel The Starless Sea is a beautifully wrought and many-layered tale; a riveting, rollicking, and complex quest for the very heart of story. For those who loved the magical depths and wondrous spaces of Morgenstern’s debut The Night Circus (2011), there is much here in her second novel to entertain and enthrall.
Addressing perceived injustice and giving us metaphors to understand suffering and redemption is some of the work modern fiction can do. Two recent novels that work to do this are Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue and Nell Zink's Doxology.
Danticat’s writing is language stripped bare which lets her stories and characters breathe. There is a rising intensity in these stories from the first sentence of the first page that draws the reader in and demands we pay attention.
Elvia Wilk’s debut novel Oval is a speculative meditation on the evil humans do—to the planet and to each other. It’s also a distinctly millennial love story and a sometimes sharp and sometimes meandering critique of modern society.
Some years back a friend told me I had to see Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild (2007) based on Jon Krakauer’s biography of Christopher McCandless, a privileged young white man who gave up his worldly goods to journey into the Alaskan wilderness.
May 2019Books
Living on the Borderlines: Stories, by Melissa Michal and Sabrina & Corina: Stories, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
There’s a lot of talk these days about the need to listen to marginalized voices and yet so many of us continue to limit our reading–by chance, circumstance, or desire–to narratives written by and for a largely white literary audience.
There is a depth of storytelling and world-creating in Black Leopard, Red Wolf that rivals Beowulf, Lord of the Rings, EarthSea, or even Dune. This is fantasy at is most complicated, entertaining, and mythically weighty.
Every once in a while a book comes along that is so powerful, so replete with well-sculpted prose and telling such an urgent narrative that I find it impossible to put down. Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel is just such a book. I want everyone to read it, especially every woman, every writer.
Originally published in 1950, this slim novel packs a major wallop. Somers (1914 – 1994, pen name for Armonía Liropeya Etchepare Locino) was a Uruguayan writer, pedagogue, and a major force in Latin American feminism. And although she was a prolific writer, this publication of The Naked Woman is Somers only novel translated into English.
Kim Sagwa's English-language debut is both a difficult and complex read. Loosely comparable to the Mean Girls and Pretty Little Liars genre with tones of Bright Lights, Big City, the novel focuses on two young women failing to cope with their lives and with each other. Set in South Korea’s “P City,” Mina and her sometimes-best-friend Crystal suffer pressures common to most teens and while also specific to South Korea. These are girls of privilege whose parents are mostly absent but expect perfect grades, perfect performance. Driven and lost with virtually no adult supervision, the end can only be tragic.
The eight stories in this collection feature varied characters in different states of diaspora each with their own powerful voice. Set in both China and the United States, not all of Chai's characters are immigrants, but each suffers from different kinds of displacement. With a vision that is both sharp and compassionate, Chai allows us to see just what it is to be “different” in a world that embraces conformity.
Daphne’s isolation in Altavista is deepened by a lack of WiFi, which makes it difficult for her to Skype with her husband. While at a café with WiFi, Daphne meets the ninety-plus Alice, who speaks some Turkish. Hearing her husband’s language encourages Daphne to reach out, and the women develop an awkward friendship; some of the only moments of adult intimacy in the novel. Alice’s grudging kindness and abrupt way of speaking make a great counterpoint to Daphne’s frenetic energy.
I first met Roy Scranton when he was at The New School. He was finishing up one degree on his way to more and I was an editor at the MFA program’s journal, LIT. He gave me a story to read that I loved so much I championed it and we ran it. This wasn’t some great victory—Scranton’s a great writer. His mastery of language is apparent from the first time you open of any of his books. So when I pitched this review to my editor I thought it would be a wholly enjoyable experience: reading a writer who understands language writing about the most pressing issue(s) of our time.
Every once in a while a book comes along that merits special attention. Shelley Jackson’s Riddance; or, The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children is one of those books.
The women in Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut collection differ in age, opportunity, and background but all share one commonality: they want to believe in love. But in a culture where they are taught that to be in love, to be desired by a man, is paramount and that little else matters, it is difficult for any woman to survive. Rodriguez’s women (and one boy) are complex, well-wrought, but cannot teach us anything except perhaps how to believe in or to survive love. These nine stories present a complex, multifaceted, and somewhat connected narrative of Puerto Rican life.
When Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, and Louise Erdrich rave about a book before its release, it had better live up to the hype and Tommy Orange’s debut, There There very much does.
Welcome to Lagos has been described as comic by some reviewers but aside from a few slapstick-esque moments and some sharply funny critique of English race relations, it reads as modern African tragedy.
Michelle Tea, queer countercultural icon, has a new book out. Against Memoir (Feminist Press, 2018) is a collection of essays and articles written for various places (some new for this book) and various audiences. All share Tea’s ability to get at the heart of difficult topics: struggles for non-binary people to survive in a largely unwelcoming binary world, women making space for themselves in punk rock, and fights over definitions of “feminism” and “woman.”
Viv Albertine is an erudite and elegant woman, an accomplished writer whose first book, the 2014 Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir achieved both critical and popular acclaim. Apart from her writing career, Albertine is best–known as a member of the British all–women punk band, The Slits.
When Ursula K. Le Guin died earlier this year, some obituaries referred to her as a “leading fantasy” writer, but some were smart enough to simply call her what she was: one of our greatest writers.
Much has already been written about Meg Wolitzer’s lengthy new novel The Female Persuasion, calling it everything from the “Great American Novel” in the New Yorker to retro elitist white middle-class feminism. I would argue that this novel is neither of those but exhibits both elements of genius and significant limitations for a twenty-first century feminist novel.
This slim volume confronts what the author identifies as a fundamental issue in academic librarianship—the perception that librarians are not teachers.
Denis Johnson (1949-2017) was, as many critics would agree, one of the most important American writers of the last several decades. While many cite Jesus’ Son (1992) as his best work (it is likely his best-known), he wrote nine novels, a few plays, several essays, and many volumes of poetry.
In Our Lady of the Prairie, Thisbe Nissen’s rambunctious and roving new novel (her third), Nissen weaves several disparate narratives into what she calls a “crazy quilt” of a novel—emphasis on “crazy.
The nightly news has become a flood of narratives of sexual harassment and the rape of women and young girls by men in positions of power which lends a decided appeal to Naomi Alderman's tale of young girls suddenly getting "the power"—an ability to zap others with their own self-generated electrical charges.
The Wardrobe Mistress is Patrick McGrath’s ninth novel, and he is top form as he paints a grim portrait of grief, fascism, and madness in post-war London.
The young female narrator has become incredibly popular particularly in American Young Adult fiction. YA is big business with a plethora of formulaic narratives and often mediocre writing.
Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest is both a novel of ideas and one of visceral emotion written with language so precise and rich that at times it can feel overwhelming.
November 2017Books
Laura Jane Grace and Dan Ozzi’s Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
The first thing you need to know about this memoir is that it gets better. Not only does life get better for Laura Jane Grace (née Tom Gabel), but the book itself gets better.
Kathy Acker’s influence over an entire generation of disaffected young women has yet to be fully explored, but with Chris Kraus’s new biography, Acker’s importance as a writer is finally being acknowledged.
I first read Darcey Steinke’s Suicide Blonde at some point in the 1990s. I was around the same age as Steinke’s protagonist, Jesse, and although my life had taken a different trajectory, I remember recognizing too much of myself in Jesse.
Sherman Alexie recently posted a frank letter on his Facebook page explaining why he was canceling the rest of his book tour.
Although Nancy Lord has been writing powerfully about our role in the destruction of our natural environment for a long while, this is the first full-length fiction by the famed Alaska naturalist and former Alaska Writer Laureate (2008-10).
It's been said that most people live small lives of quiet desperation. While this is true of many of the people in her stories, Deb Olin Unferth writes their desperation large. Reviews of Unferth’s new collection, Wait Till You See Me Dance...
I’ve spent decades listening to what other people from other places think the Pacific Northwest is all about. Reading Monica Drake’s first collection of short stories, The Folly of Loving Life, I feel I’ve finally found a way to ward off all those mis-imagined fairy tales of the cities of the Northwest that so many people have created.
I’ve always been opposed to the whole “women in rock” categorization as a ploy for lazy critics to write about musicians who also happen to be women. But the current wave of memoirs by women musicians leads me to acknowledge that something is going on and I should pay attention.
Chris Offutt is a masterful writer. His ability to immerse a reader in his narrative, his clean and clear sentences and his powerful descriptive passages all have served over time as examples of American writing at its best.
Brian Evenson—nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, finalist for the Edgar Award and the World Fantasy Award, winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Awards—is considered a master of American horror.
Anakana Schofield’s bold second novel Martin John centers on a deeply disturbed man who has been exiled to London by his mother after an “incident” in Ireland involving a young girl.
