There are some books that become more than just reads, rather reading them becomes an experience. That is just how I felt with “Summer of the Cicadas”.
News & Review Type: Review
Chelsea Catherine’s SUMMER OF THE CICADAS given praise in review from Amos Lassen!
Thoughtful input of Jennifer Risher’s WE NEED TO TALK: A MEMOIR ABOUT WEALTH from Washington Independent Review of Books
Before delving into her own experience, however, Risher introduces the topic of wealth by depicting the expectations, gratitude, and worries that come with striking it rich. But hers is not a voyeuristic take on the affluent like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” MTV’s “Cribs,” or the “Real Housewives” franchise, nor is it a “how to get rich” book.
Instead, Risher’s aim is to start an honest conversation about a taboo topic — to “demystify wealth.” She’s cognizant that hers is just one of many perspectives, and she hopes others will add their viewpoints to the larger conversation…
F(r)iction Lit gives ANIMAL WIFE a glowing review!
What captivated me most of all was how Lara Ehrlich writes her characters. The stories feature women at different stages of life or different situations, and yet they feel familiar. This may be due to these women always being connected by their relationships with other characters. They are friends, mothers, daughters—sometimes all three at once—yet they remain their own person, first and foremost. These characters are women we know or women that we, ourselves, were at one point or another…
Thanks for the shoutout World Wide Work!
UNDER NUSHAGAK BLUFF by Mia C. Heavener, SUBDUCTION by Kristen Millares Young, and SUMMER OF THE CICADAS by Chelsea Catherine were all featured on the newsletter World Wide Work: Books, Films, Music You May Have Missed.
To read more, click here.
LA Review of Books analyzes and reviews Tess Taylor’s thoughtful works
“The poems in Rift Zone exist in a moment before rupture, an overhang of historic land fractured by histories revised and erased. Taylor magnifies these tensions when she recalls the instabilities of her adolescence. Moments from her upbringing in a suburb “clean as a lobotomy” take place against the vastness of geologic space-time — “the Earth’s mantle, rock moving.” Of the muted violence in the seemingly bucolic suburbs, she writes, “No one explained the reasons / Dana found that spring / to bring her brother’s gun to school.” Greater violence seems just beyond reach and inevitable. Later, she writes of her teenage years’ dawning socio-political awareness, “We could say systemic racism / but couldn’t name yet how our lives were implicated.” The precipice of “yet” is ascribed to her present self, revealing another kind of self-awareness: “O my god that was embarrassing.”…
Joshua Rivkin’s “Suitor” reviewed and adored by 15 Bytes!
“Poetry is Joshua Rivkin’s art, but he approaches it with the keen observational powers of a scientist. Children learn to model themselves after their parents, but will often closely watch other adults where possible or necessary. In “The Suitors,” a series of fifteen poems, young Joshua, deprived for long stretches of his father’s example, observes the men who court his divorced mother to see what she seeks in a man: their looks, their clothes, how they act…”
Thanks for the review Geoff Wichert! To read more of the review, click below!
Review of IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by River Teeth Journal.
“Perhaps the sheer amount of time devoted to the work is part of the magic. McClanahan’s essays were written in the 2000s, most in and around 9/11, when she and her husband decided to have a short-lived adventure in New York City and ended up staying for eleven years. A respected essayist, she could have rested on her reputation and slapped together the previous pieces into a book. But she didn’t…”
Read more about Rebecca McClanahan’s book as Tarn Wilson gives it a glowing review below!
Marie Tozier’s OPEN THE DARK receives great praise in this article by Anchorage Daily News!
These deceptively simple poems enlarge with repeated readings; they unfold greater meaning each time and leave a reader with much to contemplate about identity, cultures, generational wisdom, and values…
Click below to read more from the review in the Anchorage Daily News!
Review of IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by Kenyon Review
The subtitle “A Memoir in Essays” suggests that this memoir will follow a nontraditional narrative, and its unexpected movements are part of the reward. The narrative rises and falls with the crescendo of sirens and tumbles into the bass notes of buses. Would-be chapters function like solos. We begin in the middle of things that have no beginning or end but are in concert with one another…
Read more of Amy Wright’s review of Rebecca McClanahan’s memoir IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY: A MEMOIR OF ESSAYS below.
Lara Ehrlich’s ANIMAL WIFE reviewed by Metapsychology Online Reviews.
“There is this kind of appeal for readers in the highly recommended Animal Wife, Red Hen Press’s Fiction Award winner, with its fresh take on the mythopoeic in relation to women’s lives. It is engaging at every turn of the page for its innovative approach. Ehrlich weaves compelling characters and situations, gripping images and language in her deft storytelling”.
[REVIEW] Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich
The cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection, Animal Wife, might make you scream. On it, a quintessential 1950’s housewife, dressed in a frilly apron and with a bow in her meticulously curled hair, offers a look of shock on one side of her face, while the other half has transformed into a snarling wolf. The effect is jarring. The cover suggests that, inside of this domesticated woman, lives a wild and dangerous beast clawing for release.
To continue reading, click here.
Midwest Book Review: Tea by the Sea
A deftly crafted and entertaining work of impressive literary nuance, “Tea by the Sea” by Donna Hemans is an extraordinary, original, and inherently fascinating novel that is especially and unreservedly commended as an addition to both community and college/university library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. One of those all too rare novels that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book is finished and set back upon the shelf, it should be noted for personal reading lists that “Tea by the Sea” is also readily available in a digital book format
Read the full review here.
On Suitor by Joshua Rivkin
In the first of two envois that appear in Joshua Rivkin’s Suitor, a speaker defines the word that gives the collection its title:
Suitor, from the Latin secutor,
to follow. I can’t
catch them, or let them go—
In addition to providing a working definition for the term as it will be used throughout the book, these lines establish the underlying tensions that inform the larger project. Here we see characters struggling against each other: the speaker against his mother’s boyfriends, his father, his own lovers. We see the push and pull of past against present in the speaker’s memory against that of his siblings or within the complicated legacy of Fritz Haber, the scientist responsible for world-changing artificial fertilizers as well as the weaponization of chlorine gas. Perhaps most of all though, we see the tension between what language can and cannot do. How it can lapidify or leave behind the things that it describes even as it tries to give them life:
. . . The love poem risks
abandonment, of speaking too soon.
Or too late . . .
This is no love poem.
Read the full review here.
Four Questions to Help Demystify Your Relationship With Money
Jennifer Risher took a job in campus recruiting at Microsoft in 1991. She was 25 and given stock options worth several hundred thousand dollars. While working there, she met her husband, David, who had more stock options than she did. He later left to work for Amazon when it was still just selling books and got even more valuable options there.
In a few years, they were worth tens of millions of dollars and on their way to a comfortable life. When Ms. Risher looks back, was it luck or good decisions that helped her land that Microsoft job?
Click here to read more.
Publisher’s Weekly: Summer of the Cicadas
Catherine wraps a fast-paced, stirring narrative about loss and unrequited love into a story about an unusually aggressive 17-year cicada swarm and the terror it brings to the residents of a West Virginia town. Jessica, a former cop, works as a security guard at the town hall, where she pines for councilwoman Natasha and regrets losing her badge amid grief over the death of her sister and parents in a car crash two years earlier, which led to a pain pill addiction and side work as a stripper to support the habit, and her eventual firing.
Read the full review here.