Fiction

Review by Rose Gold. Butterfly Tears is a collection of fifteen short stories which oscillate between China and North America. Through memories, dreams, dialogue and the sparing use of symbol, these short stories speak of the almost unendurable hardship suffered in the “Cultural Revolution” of Mao’s China...

Review by Mayra David. A hotel is the perfect setting for Strauss’ characters; eight women passing through the lobby and rooms of an impressive and impersonal hotel. Like hotel rooms, bodies may come with standard fixtures, and one can never tell who is living inside.

Review by Sharon Samuel. With gripping suspense and graphic honesty, Sofi Oksanen breathes life into “a world of brittle paper [and] moldy old albums emptied of pictures,” to create a tapestry where past meets present, and the shadow of war stands starkly against the prospect of peace.

Review by Mayra David. One family, one story; seven voices, seven lives. In this beautifully written novel, Chitra Kallay explores that great tension between being the individual versus being a part of a whole.

Review by Rhianon Huot. The year is 1855 in Walpole, New Hampshire. Louisa meets a Joseph Singer, who she falls for deeply, but doesn’t wish to surrender her life and self for....

Review by Mary Harwood. A rich, eccentric old woman who keeps a vicious bull in her pasture. Two teen-aged boys who have lost their father in an horrific car accident fueled by alcohol and abandoned by their mother.

Nonfiction

Review by Hannah Eason. The ravages of World War II in contemporary art is not new. Many memoirs and documentaries have taken as their subject the deleterious effects of the war on...

Poetry

Review by Metta Sama. We’re often trained to think of titles as the entryway to the poem; after all, it’s the first thing the eyes (are supposed to) land on when first encountering a poem. Some of us (renegades that we are) choose to save the poem for last or to meet it somewhere in the middle of our reading, a sly glance upwards that says “hmmmmm. . .

Review by Leslie Hayertz. In Notes from The Red Zone, Pacosz observes life near the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile nuclear reservation adjacent to Richland, Washington.

Review by Georgia Banks-Martin. The stories that are told on these pages are remarkable not only for what was said, but because they give shape and form to what many in the African-American community knew, however, wanted to keep hidden...

Review by Jamie Elizabeth Marko. The question of identity is a constant struggle for most Americans. We boldly declare our heritage, if we are lucky enough to know it...