No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Celebrating Diversity Since 2015
Kevin Canty’s distinguished novel, The Underworld, is the vessel of a doubled vision that perhaps all great writing possesses. It empathically depicts a society that can’t form an adequate conception of itself. To do that it must reside both within that society and also outside it, in order to gain the aesthetic leverage required to form a picture.
“Lots of girls get PhD's,” I say, doing my best to act like I’m not impressed, but I never heard of a PhD. Minerva impresses and intimidates me. She’s the first Mexican girl I’ve met who talks about going to a four year college and who knows so much. And she’s cooler than any nerd or stoner I’ve seen. I wonder why she was sitting alone.
Mohammed Diab is a revelation of a filmmaker, maturing into his art in almost ballet-like synchronicity with the revolutionary upheavals that have marked the last 7 years in his native Egypt.
Slightness is not an attribute of short books nor profundity a necessary quality of length. Banana Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi is a short, beautiful coming of age tale.
Within the first ten minutes of The Bad Batch, her social critique by way of apocalyptic fantasia, our protagonist Arlen loses both an arm and a leg to a desert-dwelling band of cannibal bodybuilders.