Book Review: The Invention Of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Following a fugitive of no name or history, a man previously alone on a unknown island with definite proof of past life though it is nowhere to be seen, in the very start of our reading, begins his diary by informing us that his found home has been encroached upon by strange tourists who exhibit strangely repetitive and incongruous behavior, of which he observes from afar, questioning whether to maintain being a stranger to the strange. This island is said to be home to a disease characterized by the symptoms of radiation poisoning, this rumor usually keeping away any visitors, including any police seeking his capture, but our fugitive is seemingly immune, the tourists seemingly as well, if you choose to believe that all the phenomena he experiences are not the ultimate result of a possible intricate conspiracy drawn from the effect of a potential intense delusion due to sickness, though Casares would never let us off with that easy of an explanation. The novel explores the consequences of invention, the ways in which men will attempt to achieve their own conceived immortality, and most poignantly, the lengths a lonely human will go to in order to grasp the sensation of love and distinct interconnectivity. Our fugitive falls into an obsessive one-sided love with a woman from the group of strangers, watching her enjoy the setting of the sun from a large rock every night, and longs to exist to and for her, despite his purposeful and evasive escapist absence from the world. This woman, despite his purposeful attempts to introduce himself to her, acts as if she doesn’t see or hear him, as do all the other tourists. This man who gave up a truly known life to escape imprisonment, who chose to purposefully isolate himself on this island, is suddenly desperately seeking a perceivable identity and future immortality in pursuit of eternity with this woman, who he finds out from her clandestine meetings with other men is named Faustine, but she is somehow unreachable. In a frenzy, and our fugitive is definitively experiencing frenzied behavior, love and the pursuit of love can drive us to do incomprehensible and intricate things in search of its attempted prolonging, and when we find even a glimmer of it’s possible existence in our lives, we often suddenly hunger for our own existence to prolong as long as this love can possibly last, ideally forever. Our fugitive is willing to give up even corporeal form in search of a timeless love with a woman he’s never even traditionally met; going forward to be open to the possibility of giving up on the brain and the soul in order to achieve the longitude of a boundless heart and infinite love. To give up on the now in pursuit of forever. “His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive.”

Book Review: Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

Raskolnikov could find solace in the dejected and personally justified opium induced violence present in Blind Owl, and the inept and desperate attempts to solitarily tidy a life filled with overflowing madness. Our narrator treats himself and views his own life like a rotten fruit, the alcoholic rot and stench of a rotting food similarly emanating from his own past due selfhood. His precious but squandered life combined with the ingesting of such large amounts of opium provides a madness inducing sensation, driving our narrator to quickly spiral, reaching a distance so far from himself he proclaims a need to “introduce himself to his shadow“ before it’s too late. “—my life was meant to be poisoned— I could not have any life but a poisoned one.” The imagery evoked and exploratory language expressed, like a song stuck in his head, repeat certain phrases and ideas in our narrators mind, each time leaving him a little less sure of their meaning, unaware of any reliability in these real and contrived images he is seeing and communicating, shallowly trusting no one else but himself, the most unreliable. Blind Owl takes a broken man and chronicles his descent into madness and murder, the book rife with the stench of unfazed death, intoxicated isolation, and starving and blind despair. The novel translates similarly to an amalgamation of the hopeless existentialism of Russian lit, which Hedayat is said to have been fond of, and the haunting graphic imagery and metaphorical language reminiscent of ancient storytelling. A quick but unsettling read, as ominous as seeing an owl in the middle of the day, and knowing its stomach is full of small fragile bones.

Book Review: All Fours by Miranda July

All Fours reinforces the fact that women’s selves and lives have layers that repeatedly peel back and reveal new features, like an onion, except we smell much better.

Our protagonist is a “semi-famous artist” in her 40s that is embarking on a cross country road trip for work and fun, or so she tells her husband and child. Driving no longer than the length it would take most of us to get to our nearest Costco, our artist exits her route to stop to check her phone but then once she gets to this small town, cats lunch, and makes intense eve contact with one (1) person, decides to check into a motel room as well, and maybe she’ll just stay there for the 3 weeks she is supposed to be traveling and not tell anyone? And maybe she’ll covertly reinvent her stale feeling self and her grubby motel room at the same time, both endeavors racking up somewhat odd and extreme costs.

“—surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing; waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.”

July, in her second novel, seemingly reimagines the stigmatized and pitiable “mid-life crisis”, chronicling our protagonist exploring herself and others sexually, spiritually, and obsessively. The writing is curiously experimental in its content yet stylistically classically austere, so that even in moments of shocking scenes, unimaginable relationships, and unsettling thoughts, you feel as unfazed as you possibly could due to the sharing-of-a-secret like quietness of the storytelling. She appears to us like a friend, we will listen to her less than wise choices, support whatever makes her happy (if it’s not criminal), and will standby and let her carnestly sow her questionable oats because she we can all agree she is most likcly having “a mid-life crisis”, right? to label it that way makes it easier to digest, right?

As you age, you can almost physically feel the years piling on top of you, and it becomes increasingly hard to change and adjust yourself under the weight of it all, like not wanting to wake a sleeping pet on your lap but really needing to change positions. Our protagonist’s zeal for life has metaphorically fallen asleep under the conditions she’s in, and she takes this opportunity, under the cover of darkness, to get a sense of consciousness of the self back, and explore what change she feels she wants and needs. “I needed to know if my wants were any different or larger than other people’s.”

July’s writing insists you suspend your disbelief at times, feeling maybe like you should just read with one eye open and try not to imagine some of these scenes in your brain too hard because some small parts are maybe a little gross to think about, but then other parts will strikingly portend a unique realness and depth, and these larger moments of depth and clarity center the crooked or unusual details.

In All Fours, we see that sometimes the only way it feels possible to migrate from one stage of life to another is anonymously, in a new place, not confidently standing up straight but curiously crawling on all fours; “It’s hard to be knocked down when your on all fours.”

The Times I Dare To Share

Art by Komako Sakai

I almost think, or maybe I know, a lot of time in my writing, that I am speaking up from down on my knees, bruising myself as I somehow always do so easily, and like someone alone in an empty church, I go on desperately begging for someone to care.

Writing, creating, and sharing any kind of art — we flippantly tell ourselves we are humbly but idiosyncratically contributing to a whole, that we honestly (said dishonestly) don’t care for deep acclaim, claiming to not feel the sensation of our hearts shriveling up into something akin to a soft dried cherry when someone sees our concept in execution and is utterly indifferent; like a dedicated spider who artfully and carefully weaved their web in order to subtly catch the right attention, and every subject blithely walks right through it, sending you careening, picking up your own pieces, wanting to take them home, wishing you could’ve kept them for yourself before the influence of others and your own lack of influence on someone else ruined it for you.

I feel slightly juvenile when sharing anything original I’ve created; A naive child coming home from school with objectively simple art that they are nonetheless infinitely proud of, but that crushingly never ends up on the fridge, or if it does, only for a little while, before it’s filed away and forgotten. It almost makes you want to just secretly steal it back and throw it away, but you also know there’s some part of you that will long for its innocent creation later in life, remembering fondly when this was the best you could do, and how that trying of your best made you feel.

I occasionally post my work, sometimes against every instinct telling me no one will care, and honestly, they often don’t. I am just one of many, a student in an ever encompassing class of infinite size, the teachers grading my work rightly also busy with their own lives, other endless things on their minds, most definitely more important things to do than linger on something they probably think I didn’t work as hard as I did on conceiving. No one will love your metaphorical baby in the same way you do, they have not seen for themselves the things it has taken out of you during and after its delicate conception.

I don’t blame them, and I don’t blame you, and even though I often do, I shouldn’t blame myself. There is only so much time, and one has to be in the exact right mood to invite this excess thought into their brain; sometimes I scroll through media slow and deliberately, eager to consume, and other times my mind is checked out, barely registering what I am dignifying with a press of the like button, or in cases of attention grabbing or pleasing posts, paying attention to long enough to share, trying to continue a showcasing of my outwardly sophisticated taste. I can so often easily and genuinely appreciate the work of those other than myself, sometimes even more than my own works, but I also know of the limits of my own and others consumption, that the most personalized piece could slip past me or others so easily, lost in the shuffle of too broad of a scroll, an app crashing, a skimming of a page.

We all, whether consciously or unconsciously, crave for someone to have as much regard for our thoughtful creative endeavors as we do, sometimes even seeking more praise than you even have for yourself, in order to reassure us that something intrinsically connected to ourselves is worth acknowledging; worthy of even a semblance of commendation, in order to somewhat avoid our own frustrated condemnation of our work and ourselves for thinking anyone would have enough time to spare to give us this shallow but personally necessary veneration.

“Can vou take a look at this for a second?” “Can you tell me if this looks good?” “Can you please proofread this for me to make sure it works?” “I posted something, can you go look at it?” “I made this, but you don’t have to look at it right now if you don’t want to.” “Can you go add a heart to my post? No one has liked it yet.” “Do you care to check out this passion project of mine?” “Do you care? Can you care? Who will care? That’s okay, I don’t care if no one cares.”

I truthfully do care, very deeply, but I also understand why someone else might not, even if that hurts. Even if no one cares, I should still share, if I think it’s shareable, even if it contains a chipped off piece of me I can’t just easily take back or reattach when I don’t get the reception I know I craved.

There is only so much care out there to spare for all the things I deign to share, even when I painstakingly lay myself bare, even if I went and ripped out my own hair, even if the blood, sweat, and tears I expressed in this piece were the only ones I had to spare.

— S.H.E

Book Review: Committed by Suzanne Scanlon

Reading novels about mental illness when you are in a limbo in your own mental health journey feels akin to dining in at a restaurant that gave you food poisoning a month ago: you can still vividly remember the sickness, and while you objectively know the chances of getting sick that sick again so soon are small, the act of consuming anything from this source after your history has you suddenly feeling the bile rising back up your throat, the depression reanimating in the dark corners of your brain, a comforting yet pernicious beckoning back into the feelings and state of mind you know unfortunately too well.

I haven’t personally been committed to the hospital for my mental illness, but I have spent the majority of my life committed to trying to live with it, barely living with it; it’s presence at points causing the living I am doing to be in the barest and simplest sense of the term.

Committed, is as it’s claim, on meaning and madwomen, encompassing the mental health environment of the 1990s to now, Scanlon’s personal history with it, and the ways in which writing and reading have been for her an unchanging life giving constant throughout it all.

Scanlon personally explores the literary canon of mentally ill literature, from Girl, Interrupted and The Bell Jar, to Virginia Woolf and Kate Chopin, deeply melancholic stories about and from women we have all come to be extremely familiar with in the literary sphere of unwell women. She unpacks the ways in which she unhealthily finds but also comfortingly seeks kinship in these women’s stories, testaments, and untimely deaths, moments of shared maddening clarity that provide a conflicted feeling of recognition and familiarity while also giving over a feeling of being head-achingly nauseous at the fact that you can relate so deeply with these women while seeing the sinister ways in which their lives ultimately turned out. “I identify with her, a girl says, and I’m not sure I’m supposed to.”

“The freedom of the madwoman, as Susan Sontag wrote in her journal, both dream and trap.”

As women, sometimes the ones who identify with our madness so dizzyingly are just as introspective and quiet about it, leaving us feeling lonely in it all. But as Scanlon expresses in the book, it is in literature where we can most easily identify ourselves, whether fiction or non; it’s easier to confess to and configure in words your own instability on your own time, in a room of your own, as Woolf says, somewhere not only to write but to come to terms with self, while alone but also in regards to others. “As James Baldwin put it, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are
unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’”

“I’m sorry, my dear, but this is all we have.
Words. This is our medium.”

“Where would I be without these women with messed-up lives?” A question I ask myself too often; If not for the reassurance that other women have felt this way have always felt this way, would I be better or worse off? I am not alone, I am not the only one who feels like this, but in constantly seeking out this feeling in others in order to make myself feel less guilty, maybe I am moving too much in a quicksand already trying to swallow me up. “The story is about your suffering and the story creates your suffering too.”

In writing about these things, I feel similar to what Scanlon expresses in the book, “I had the sense that if I could turn my own melting into something the way Audre Lorde did, the way Virginia Woolf did it would mean something. All my suffering, my stupid life, would mean something.” Through this desperate weaving of words in order to salvage something of the life we have felt has gone to waste, maybe we will make something that will make us feel it was at least somewhat worth it, that this madness had and has a deeper meaning. “— what is madness if not the horror of being misunderstood, of being unable to make a self comprehensible to another?”

Sometimes I know I am too committed to my own history and current situation with mental illness, but I am committed in a way you would find in a long-term relationship;
My mental illness has been there as long as I can remember, and even with all of my attempts and desperate longing to get better, to be better, I know deep in my soul that there is something about it’s presence and the excuse of it that is comforting. I am the way I am because of this crutch I have been walking on my whole life, and even if I have healed enough to walk without this crutch, at this point it is fused to my being and I only know myself in context to it. “—to indulge all of what you’ve been told is wrong with you.”

“— being sick is a cure for how bad you feel.”
I am not myself without my madness, and yet I wish I knew who I could be without it. I wish the metaphorical chair I have warmed for myself was more like someone else’s. But maybe I just need to stand up, or at least let this worn spot become less comfortable, even though this imprinted shape in the space I have taken up for so long might be the only place I recognize myself. One day I will be able to recognize myself as better, even if it’s only in fleeting moments. Scanlon succeeds in her exploration of madness, continuing with the ever present and profitable literary role of hysteria, that in itself is maddening to consume.

Book Review: First Love by Lilly Dancyger

I hesitated to share this review, thinking that in briefly sharing my own differing experience with the subject of the book in this review might come across as buying into the ever-present “what-about-me-ism” seen especially on Tik Tok. I didn’t want to subvert the incredible value of this piece by bogging it down at all by my own anecdotes, as this book is incredibly meaningful both to the author and for those who can relate to her. I still feel a bit unsure about it, but also by sharing I do hope my own portrayed as unorthodox history with this phenomenon strikes a cord with someone else that feels a bit left out of this world of extremely close friendship; To not know someone else better than yourself, to have fallen victim too deeply to introspection.

big thank you to @thedialpress for my ARC copy of this book!

There is something specifically insightful (and slightly devastating) about reading this book as a woman who has never had a friendship like the ones explored between the women in this book’s pages. I have 2 incredible sisters, an amazing mom, an extremely lovable grandmother, but I have never had the type of unparalleled attached at the hip type of female friendship that they often show in movies, tv, or books.

There is a underlying hollowness present in my life, and I’m sure many other women’s, in the shape of a female best friend (the one you do everything with, that you tell everything to, go everywhere with) that due to different circumstances in my life, I have never been able to fill. I think this sensation of isolation from a type of friendship that seems quintessential to girlhood and womanhood is extremely under-talked about, despite my knowing of so many women online who feel this alone. There is a stigma of being a woman with no girl best friends, that you are potentially unlikable, unsupportive of others, view yourself as superior; There is the simple unacknowledged causation of this type of unchosen independence: lack of opportunity that has slowly morphed into self isolation. It feels like you’ve missed a train everyone else had this certain someone else get them a ticket for, and you don’t know where to even begin to be allowed on board.

But in no way is this book about me, and I went into it knowing I needed to put my lack out of mind in order to openly welcome the value and uniquely manifested presence of other women’s platonic love.

Lilly chronicles her tumultuous childhood through her friendships: skipping school, drinking and doing drugs, going out to clubs, lounging for hours on the fire escape; trying to be older than she is while still lavishing in the value of her girlhood relationships. Is there any more commonly normalized and advertised part of being a woman than the confidence and company of a group of girlfriends?

In this book, Dancyger unpacks while also processing deep traumas in her life, reminiscing upon the entrance and exits of multiple impactful and deeply important relationships, the priceless girl friends of days past and future. While in the midst of grief for the loss of her cousin, one of her closest, longest, and most cherished friends, Lilly takes this opportunity to deeply reflect and desperately cling to the women in her life, truly the most invaluable relationships you can be granted in this life.

I am grateful to be a spectator of the magic of female friendships, the transformative power they provide to girls who are slowly growing into women and once they become women, the petty triumphs these friendships’ temperamental drama teaches you to overcome, the companionship of women who will catch you when you fall and listen to you when you yap, push you out of your comfort zone but tuck you back in when you need to get that comfort back. Despite my own personal lack of this type of love, a fact that has cornered me into my shell with an isolating vengeance that often no longer lets me hope for this experience, or seek it, I can deeply appreciate this kind of love’s incomparable value when I see it, and despite the fact that this specific kind of love can at this moment never be able to be truly defined, or bottled for me to entirely capture it myself, Dancyger artfully and idiosyncratically eternalizes it’s impact on her in her life so far, and it’s impact upon her is equally heartwarming and heart-wrenching to experience.

Book Review: Any Person is The Only Self by Elisa Gabbert

For purveyors and curators of literary and cultural parallels, those of us who consume so much content as to not anymore be able to explore new artistic territory without suddenly being mentally taken aback and thrown into the rolodex of references in our minds; internally asking ourselves what preexisting sensation have I felt in response to a piece of art that identifies with what I feel in this moment? Who out there has expressed for me what I could not express for myself, in better or different ways?

I so often have moments of uncanny coincidence – a scene from a past dream perfectly enacting itself in reality, hearing a topic or a phrase said in person right before it appears in a book or a song, experiencing a piece of media at a weirdly exacting point in my life where it’s content is eerily topical to the state of mind I am in and these moments always prove to be almost bone chilling, sometimes (though rarely) seemingly impossible enough to even push forward a questioning of one’s faith, because in what would I need to believe for this synchronized moment to make sense, to feel possible? In the heat of questioning these fleeting coincidences, to quote the Talking Heads, “you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

In Any Person is The Only Self, Gabbert sources from her own personal libraries of human experience, cultural history, and literary knowledge and warmly weaves this collection of intricate and dovetailing essays equally consisting of poignant references to niche but deeply touching pieces of art both integral and conducive to the unique and personal formative moments, thoughts, and memories of her
own.

These deeply personal parallels and correlations Gabbert draws throughout the book
-channeling countless references from underrated hidden gems to iconic figures and works so often resonated with me as to evoke an almost tickling feeling, aligned so funnily with my own experienced media and personal life, creating a special bond in my mind with Gabbert herself; how did this book of hers end up in my hands at this exact moment, and did she even have a modicum of intuition into the ways it would resonate with someone else? how her topics would prove to be so incredibly topical to a complete stranger?

I often feel like the truest and most authentic writing often takes place when the pressure to pander to a wider audience is abandoned, though inevitably producing a smaller reception, for those who do align with it, this authenticity produces an incomparably deeper and identifiable experience for the reader. To write a collection of essays with references so idiosyncratic to herself and her own history could definitely consequently go on to be a shot in the dark, but a shot in the dark does inevitably hit at least one target.

Gabbert writes about literature and culture in a way that only someone truly passionate about these topics could, referencing ranging topics from Proust to Phil Collins, Kierkegaard to Keanu Reeves, Woolf, Sontag, Carrington, Plath, Shelley, oh my! At one point in the book, Gabbert says the line from Sylvia Plath’s poem
“Lady Lazarus”, “I eat men like air.” is one she perpetually wishes she could’ve written herself, and while she might not have conceived this iconic line evoking the carnivorous consuming of men as easily as taking a breath, she has her own type of consumption, that of endless artistic expressions, and she pulls from the air of these seemingly tangential pieces what would be for others the most indiscernible similarities, but then goes to prove them to share such valuable parallels and likenesses.

If I had to myself reference a piece that to me aligns with the essence of this book, it would undoubtedly be: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”
James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

Book Review: A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux’s genre bending and briefly existent novel “A Woman’s Story” is exactly as the title says: A woman’s story. The woman in question is Ernaux’s mother, who had recently passed at the time of the books conception.

Ernaux utilizes writing’s testifying aspect of personal storytelling, and the deeply healing yet repeatedly scorching effect of a forced exploration of grief and the painful yet cathartic reiteration of the essence of the one lost.

The writing in this book has a charged straight forwardness, quiet and biographical, but occasionally flourished with emotionally impactful and deeply final sentences and sentiments. The writing is in no way flowery or embellished, Ernaux’s grief for her relationship with her mother not manifesting itself in that way; Annie wants to communicate her mother in a way that is unbiased but authentic, an impossible undertaking with a relationship this complex and incomparable.

“As I write, I see her sometimes as a “good”, sometimes as a “bad” mother. To get away from these contrasting views, which come from my earliest childhood, I try to describe and explain her life as if I were writing about someone else’s mother and a daughter who wasn’t me.”

At a point in the book, Ernaux talks of a fleeting comparison she made as a daughter, which did not sit right with me. “Fleetingly, I confuse the woman who influenced me most with an African mother pinning her daughter’s arms behind her back while the village midwife slices off the girl’s clitoris.” In these circumstances she has posited of her upbringing with her mother, and considering she is a white woman, I think the ways in which Ernaux explains the emotionally charged relationship with her mother, whether negatively or positively, in no way provide a justifiable comparison to young African women’s forced genital mutilation, and I think this line should definitely have been edited out, as it feels like an unnecessary sensationalization of her far different type of matriarchal influence to an actual inhumane and tragically perpetuated sexually repressing practice forced upon young girls commonly in certain countries, ones very much less commonly white and privileged than France.

Aside from this comment I thought came across as naive and insensitive, Ernaux chronicles her mother’s life and death in her own juxtapositional dejected yet tender fashion, her way of writing this both cathartic and deeply emotional for her, but also often jarring and unsettling for the reader. There is no easy or truly encompassing way to recapture a mother’s life and death, but there is an especially unique insight and understanding of a mother specific only to a daughter, and in this book, Ernaux definitely fulfills this uneasily undertaken but almost certain role of a secretarial daughter.

Book Review: The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes

This book is for anyone who has ever doubted women’s ability to embody and impart genius and innovation while concurrently dealing with the complexities of loss, motherhood, academia, politics, ailments, and how these hurdles can consequently fracture sisterhood and human connection.

The Flattery sisters, Olwen, Rhona, Nell, and Maeve, tragically lost their parents at a young age, quickly plunging them all into early adulthood, and deep into academia
and self sufficiency as coping mechanisms.
Beginning the book and throughout, we meet these four sisters while they are all in their 30s, all currently choosing not to be in relationships, and all graduates of PHDs. Yet despite these similarities, all 4 sisters complicatedly yet tenderly intellectualize life differently, and internally propose to provide change in the world and meaning to their lives in their own ways.

These women, known intellects of deep renown,
joined in their search for Olwen, who has gone off the grid due to an existential crisis, when together so nonchalantly ponder thesis level topics with thoughtfulness and care, more comfortable pointedly exploring Geology or arguing the causes of global warming than endeavoring into their own emotional traumas, or confronting their joint fear of change and the world of personal, life altering alternatives.

There is a conflicting pointed softness to conversations had between sisters, especially ones of intellectual basis.
Curiously parsing through topics such as Climate Change, sustainability, government politics, birth control, etc. while cooking each other dinner, changing their nephews diaper, looking for something for the other to borrow; as women, and as sisters, they, and we, provide thoughtful and important conversations of academia and intellectualism with a range of complexity that these subiects’ pontifications don’t naturally have on their own.

I think women of intellect, possessors of doctorates, professors, scientists, etc. are so often seen as less woman than they are, pressured to downplay their innate female qualities in order to be universally acknowledged in their fields. To be taken seriously, often women cannot afford to adopt the same nonchalance around their intelligence that men assume men can; god forbid a woman be intelligent while also being loving, intelligent while beautiful or especially tuned into her appearance, intelligent while also being funny; god forbid a woman contain nuance in her behavior and immense variety in her emotions and feelings. A woman’s intelligence must constantly be turned on, it’s existence always at risk of being questioned by others.

As women, we are constantly feeling as if we have to moderate ourselves, while also deeply feeling the suffocating
moderation imposed by the rest of the world, and these women are tired of living in moderation, alone, victim of their own attempted intellectualization, their shrugging off of their own feelings, ailments, and relationships, and desperately need this chance to come together to be forced and guided in their attempts to puzzle through their increasingly disparate lives.

Hughes doesn’t ask much of the reader, just simply to keep pace with the conversations and thoughts presented, to carefully listen and understand, and it becomes easy to forget you aren’t really there, that you could help but join them. She genuinely just asks of you to care, positing that “it’s impossible to be in the world, devoid of care.” and that’s, at the end of the day, all they ask of each other as well.

Brief Reviews of Recent Reads

Family Meal by Bryan Washington

Grief is For People by Sloane Crosley

Misrecognition by Madison Newbound

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

The Most by Jessica Anthony

Monsters by Claire Dederer

Study For Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

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