Issue 1.5

  BLOOMSBURY, DECEMBER 2022, 419 pp. I’ve always found the question of what it is that a character wants very boring and annoying. I’ve heard it asked many times in creative writing workshops when someone, usually a woman (and sometimes that woman is me), has handed in a story where there are lots of pretty sentences that convey a deep emotionality but where nothing in particular happens. The general consensus is that that’s not enough

THE NOVELS BELOW revolve around abortions, but they are also about community, mutuality, the blurring of the lines between self and others. The connections and collaborations here remind us that people will always band together during the most difficult times and decisions of their lives. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore KNOPF, 1994 It’s the summer of 1972, and Sils Chaussee is fifteen and pregnant.  Her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, Mike, wants to raise

  FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, JANUARY 2023, 176 PP. NO ONE KNOWS why they remember anything. Even the details of a disaster, like your time as a hostage, or the hurricane that swept away your house, may be shrouded in protective amnesia, while you can precisely describe the insignia on a set of buttons you saw when you were four. As Janet Malcolm puts it in her posthumous memoir, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory,

  PENGUIN, OCTOBER 2022, 352 PP. A DYSTOPIA IS an imaginary place where neither you nor I would want to dwell, for it dramatically extends the most painful and dangerous features of the present moment. As such, a dystopia warns us to change the present while we can. The imagined United States of Celeste Ng’s new novel, Our Missing Hearts, has gone through “The Crisis,” a long economic depression that spawned social disruption and crime.

  FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, OCTOBER 2022, 419 PP. THE FRENCH, ELIZABETH Hardwick wrote, “have a nearly manic facility and energy” for the art of homage. The literary guest of the French table rushes off, perhaps leaves early, to transcribe the night’s witticisms. So copious is this national record keeping that a meeting between artists can be viewed from multiple perspectives, like sculpture in the round. Not so, Hardwick argues, in the United States, where

BIBLIOASIS, NOVEMBER 2022, 240 PP. IN 1846, THE British writer William Thoms coined the compound word folklore to describe “the traditional beliefs and customs of the common people,” replacing prior terms popular antiquities or popular literature. Lore in this coinage derives from learning or instruction to evoke the way in which this body of shared knowledge is passed along orally among the folk who practice it. Within the category of folklore nests the subcategory of

FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, SEPTEMBER 2022, 288 PP. WHEN DIAGNOSED WITH a chronic illness, it’s easy to split your life into two periods: prediagnosis and postdiagnosis. Maybe you’ve suffered mysterious symptoms for years, but (finally) having a name for your experience ostensibly gives you a pathway forward. In the last few years, a swell of illness memoirs has described this journey, including Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus, Lara Parker’s Vagina

  CITY LIGHTS, DECEMBER 2022, 232 PP. BY PAGE 33 of her engrossing and candid memoir, filmmaker Joyce Chopra has revealed that while growing up in 1950s New York, men regularly exposed themselves to her in cruising cars, on the subway, and under the Coney Island boardwalk. She has been sexually assaulted by her brother and raped by an ex-boyfriend, has had an illegal abortion, and moved to Paris to pursue filmmaking, where she’s repeatedly