Havana breathes, swears and cries in Dariel Suárez’s first novel, The Playwright’s House (Red Hen Press, 2021). With a plot that blends family stories and national history, this is a beautifully layered book that shows Cuba through the eyes of a native.
News & Review Type: Review
Review of THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE by Dariel Suarez from Latino Stories!
THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE reviewed by On The Seawall!
This July, Cuba erupted into its widest protests in a generation. News reports credit food and medicine shortages and summer power outages as the catalysts for the demonstrations which have been countered by a government crackdown involving mass arrests and summary trials, sparking an international outcry.
Starred review given to Nicole Stellon’s book EVERYTHING NEVER COMES YOUR WAY!
In her inviting third poetry collection, Everything Never Comes Your Way, Nicole Stellon O’Donnell (You Are No Longer in Trouble) muses on the struggles and transcendence of “family-tethered Alaska life.” The title comes from the opening poem, addressed to a young baseball player, and introduces the element of chance, which O’Donnell further investigates in “Memoir,” about the vicissitudes of life and what we choose to omit from the record.
JANE OF BATTERY PARK by Jaye Viner gets reviewed by Foreword!
A chance encounter changes the trajectory of two lives in Jaye Viner’s novel Jane of Battery Park.
Eight years ago, Jane and Daniel met and connected in Battery Park. She saw a cute surfer dude. He saw a gorgeous girl. And the man watching them saw Daniel as a threat.
Jane and Daniel’s plans to meet the next day were derailed when Daniel was kidnapped by the Vanguard, a group of conservative religious domestic terrorists who take celebrities whom they feel showcase base morals and stream their “trials.” Consequences for a guilty verdict are immediate.
JANE OF BATTERY PARK by Jaye Viner reviewed in the Midwest Book Review!
Read the glowing review here!
Dexter L. Booth’s ABRACADABRA, SUNSHINE was featured on 10 Can’t Miss New Books!
Check out the full list here!
FROM THE CAVES by Thea Prieto reviewed in Publishers Weekly!
In Prieto’s trenchant debut, the survivors of an apocalypse navigate a scorched land full of desolation and desperation. Among the enigmatic cast is Mark, a bossy young man; Tie, a compassionate pregnant woman; Teller, a wise old man with a limp; and Sky, an impressionable eight-year-old mourning the death of Green, formerly his mentor and quasi-leader of the group.
THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE by Dariel Suarez has an appearance in The Massachusetts Review!
In his debut novel, Dariel Suarez takes the reader into the heart of Cuba, of Havana, of the people of the island. As a Cuban American, I notice how the people of the island are often erased from the stories set in Cuba, the stories written “about” Cuba. Cubans often suffer from a dehumanizing romanticization if not utter erasure from an imperial gaze that doesn’t know how to fit the people into their view of the island they vacation in or dream about. Yet Suarez is too skilled a writer, knows the people of Cuba too well, and The Playwright’s House has too much heart and power, to do anything other than keep Cubans front and center in this novel.
Read the full review here!
ABRACADABRA, SUNSHINE by Dexter L. Booth reviewed by Poetry Foundation!
Most of the poems in Dexter L. Booth’s second collection, Abracadabra, Sunshine, are addressed to old lovers, friends, and family, and seek understanding amid the emotional complexities of adult life. Booth is a storyteller with elegant metaphors and references to mythology and the natural world, but what is most distinctive about his poetry is the way he juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images and events, while “attempting / to form an argument.”
Read the full review here!
Raving Review of JANE OF BATTERY PARK by Publishers Weekly!
“In Viner’s exquisite debut, a Southern California woman raised in a cult struggles to reconnect with a lost love amid a dystopian society…With a wholly original and eerily suspenseful story, Viner has created a modern society that’s just creepy enough to be believable. Fans of Margaret Atwood will eat this up.” — Publishers Weekly
Read the full review here!
BODY OF RENDER by Felicia Zamora reviewed in Booklist!
There is a jagged urgency to award-winning and CantoMundo Fellow Zamor’s sixth book. The opening section, “At the Hand of Other,” consists of 30 one-stanza poems that each lean toward memory and immediacy while the poet seeks balance within a staggering sense of loss. “Poem to America” reads: “oh / society oh; what you cull, piece by piece; what / you strip; what grows back only in time.” Zamora doesn’t mince words in this frank collection of political verse meant to speak for the voiceless.
Read the full review here!
Carl Marcum’s A CAMERA OBSCURA reviewed in New York Journal of Books!
A Camera Obscura stands at the crossroads of many such conversations: one could talk about the close, careful pacing of Mr. Marcum’s prose, a storytelling manner that often feels akin to Ted Kooser and Li-Young Lee, were they watching not Nebraska and Pennsylvania but the stars slowly turning above them.
TOUCHING CREATURES, TOUCHING SPIRIT reviewed in the Gay & Lesbian Review!
THE TITLE of Judy Grahn’s sixteenth book beckons readers into a world in which all living species share a net of consciousness, a mind as distinct from the brain as a biological organ. The ten essays and “true stories” in the Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit exhibit an openness to phenomena that enables Grahn to explore what she describes as her sensory, cellular, and spirit-related consciousness.
Read more here!
BUY ME LOVE by Martha Cooley Reviewed in Foreword Reviews!
In Martha Cooley’s novel Buy Me Love, a woman’s lottery win reveals her complicated relationships with money, family, and art.
Read the rest of the review here!
Washington Independent reviews A CAMERA OBSCURA by Carl Marcum!
In A Camera Obscura, Carl Marcum invites us into the skies with a collection wound around the technical language of astronomy and lived experience on Earth. A poem in sections, “The Hubble Meditations,” based on deep-space images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (as referenced in the collection’s notes), pulls together space, Earth, human history, mythology, and ancestry.