Noelle McManus
TALK KAYLA MARTINEZ IS a writer, filmmaker, and Fulbright fellow teaching English in Madrid. In Kayla’s final undergraduate year at the University of Chicago, LIBER published their debut short story, “Gratification.” Noelle McManus and Jennifer Baumgardner talked with Kayla about Gen Z humor, hybrid storytelling, and the strangely enduring appeal
- Close Encounters
North Yorkshire, UK; Methuen Drama, 2008, 288 pp., $25.95, paperback A short synopsis of English playwright Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted: Tabloid journalist Ian and his much-younger girlfriend, Cate, check into a hotel room. Ian makes several racist and homophobic comments and berates Cate’s intelligence. They discuss what seems to
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 1
MARCH/APRIL 2022
- Crit
Kyle Channing Smith ON OCTOBER 5, 2021, writer Joyce Carol Oates tweeted: “they” will not become a part of general usage, not for political reasons but because there would be no pronoun to distinguish between a singular subject (“they”) & a plural subject (“they”). language seeks to communicate w/
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022
- The Inevitable
Knopf, March 2022, 192 pp. Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, is not about swimming, however it might try to make you believe that it is. Otsuka, award-winning writer of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, takes us to an underground swimming club whose members
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 1
MARCH/APRIL 2022
- Ruins
NEW DIRECTIONS, JULY 2023, 96 PP. THE ROAD TO the City is, at face value, apolitical. In an afterword from 1964, when Natalia Ginzburg was forty-eight, she describes the conception and creation of this, her first published book: “And I remembered how my mother, whenever she read a novel that
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 2
SUMMER 2023
- Inconsistent Animals
DRAWN & QUARTERLY, SEPTEMBER 2022, 436 PP. YEARS AGO, MY parents gave me Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton for Christmas. It was a collection of short, witty comics about literature, history, and feminism, a follow-up to the best-selling 2011 collection Hark! A Vagrant, which began as a webcomic Beaton
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 4
FALL 2022
- Mirror, Mirror
EUROPA EDITIONS, MAY 2022, 224 PP. Fuyuko Irie is a thirty-four-year-old freelance proofreader from Japan. One of her most defining characteristics, in her opinion, is that she likes to go for a walk once a year on Christmas Eve, her birthday. “But I was sure that no one else
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 2
MAY/JUNE 2022
- Women, In Love
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, FEBRUARY 2023, 128 PP. ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET’S 1974 film Successive Slidings of Pleasure starts with the protagonist tying her nude female lover to the bed frame to paint flowers over her nipples. The next we see of this lover, she is dead, stabbed in the breast with
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 1
SPRING 2023
- It Can't Be Helped
GROVE ATLANTIC, NOVEMBER 2022, 672 PP. I’VE PREFACED FAR too many conversations lately with “I’ve just read Kafka’s diaries.” I actually read Kafka’s diaries about six months ago, but I can’t shake the feeling I’ve discovered something incredible. It’s silly, I know. Surprise, surprise: Kafka is good. But I’ve been
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 5
WINTER 2022