… single everyday moments are the focal point in Gen, and it can be argued that they are also the focal point of life. Life is, after all, nothing but a series of moments – a kiss, a bike ride, a proposal, and Gen is, at its core, a heart-warming and tongue-twisting attempt to capture these moments.
Alexandra Ford’s debut novel, What Remains at the End? is a fearless attempt to convey the atrocities suffered by Danube Swabians in 1940s Yugoslavia at the hands of Tito’s Partisan regime. Many of this German-speaking ethnic minority fled, seeking refuge as far as America; of those who stayed, tens of thousands died, either perishing in Read More
The Glass Aisle enfolds the reader with intricacies and figures of sound, exploring noise, rhythm and also silence within its pages. Addressing time, loss and childhood memories ─ told through the stories of ordinary people ─ the collection’s musicality and its preoccupation with voices make for its signature sonic tapestry. This is the tenth book of poetry from Read More
David Llewellyn’s A Simple Scale sets out to provide the reader with a profoundly humbling experience: the attainment of the understanding that all our lives are ultimately at the mercy of the tides of history and that we and our fellow men are undeniably responsible for how that history plays out. Llewellyn explores this idea Read More
“The day before the murder, George Bull tried to poison me with a cheese sandwich.” With this hook, Maria Donovan opens her debut novel, The Chicken Soup Murder. The narrator is eleven-year-old Michael Davies, battling lactose intolerance alongside the perplexities of impending adolescence in a small coastal town in Dorset. Michael lives with his Nan Read More
Seren Book’s In Reality: Selected Poems is the first major glimpse of poetry by award winning Luxembourger Jean Portante, translated for English speaking readers. The book gathers selected poems from his major collections, notably In Reality and What Does and What Doesn’t Come to Pass, and provides the original French in parallel with Zoë Skoulding’s Read More
Imagine waking up one morning to find a bask of crocodiles and their very unapologetic owner have moved in next door! Half allegorical, half magical realism, Kate Hamer’s mesmerizing “Crocodile Hearts” will even have you examining your own place within a community. This idea of how an outsider can threaten a quiet suburban existence is Read More
I wanted people to sit still for one goddam minute but they flash through your life – portraits are for the dead. In these lines, Tamar Yoseloff voices Jackson Pollock as part of a remarkable narrative sequence, but such is her versatility that it may also speak of her own prolific, multi-faceted output. An American, Read More
When reading poetry I have a habit of dog-earing the most affecting pages. Unfortunately for my edition of Rosie Shepperd’s The Man at the Corner Table, I’ve dog-eared damn near every page. Shepperd trained as an economist and has worked in finance throughout the UK and the US, all the while publishing poems in the Read More
How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote [.] The first lines of Imagined Sons’ opening poem “A Birthmother’s Catechism” make an uncompromising, direct introduction to Etter’s most recent collection, which explores nearly two decades of pain and Read More