USEREVIEW 146: Mon Dieu, Love

USEREVIEW 146: Mon Dieu, Love

Deirdre Danklin prisms the slivers of light in Jane V. Blunschi’s debut novella Mon Dieu, Love (Texas Review Press, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-68003-343-4 | 122 pp | 19.95 USD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Mon Dieu, Love by Jane V. Blunschi, winner of the 2022 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize (selected by Renee Gladman), is a novella about love. It’s about romantic love in all its twisting permutations — between Elise and a nun named Michael, between Elise

Read More

USEREVIEW 145 (Capsule): Glass Essays

USEREVIEW 145 (Capsule): Glass Essays

J.A. BernsteinGlass Essays (Variant Literature, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-95560-213-6 | 29 pp | $11 USD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Glass Essays by J.A. Bernstein, published in 2023 by Variant Literature, is a chapbook of short personal essays that covers the author’s time in the Israeli Army, his work as a professor in Mississippi and his domestic life with his wife and children. The pieces in this collection take a moment in time (children running — their mother

Read More

USEREVIEW 144 (Capsule): The Red Book of Farewells

USEREVIEW 144 (Capsule): The Red Book of Farewells

Pirkko Saisio (Writer), Mia Spangenberg (Translator)The Red Books of Farewells (Center for the Art of Translation, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-94964-146-2 | 312 pp | $24.95 USD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio, published for the first time in English in 2023 by the Center for the Art of Translation, is a novel about a woman who comes of age in Finland during the height of radical political discourse and experimental theatre

Read More

USEREVIEW 079: Do You Believe in Ghosts?

USEREVIEW 079: Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Like a seance, this traditional review by Deirdre Danklin will reveal the spirits that animate Andrea King’s debut novel Spectral Living (University of Calgary Press, 2021). ISBN 978-1-77385-147-1 | 192 pp | $27.99 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Do you believe in ghosts? This question comes up at every gathering of writers I’ve ever hosted. Above a cheeseboard, putting jam on scones, the question pops out. Most of my friends believe — they swear upon

Read More

USEREVIEW 058: The Death Card

USEREVIEW 058: The Death Card

Samantha Garner’s debut novel The Quiet Is Loud (Invisible Publishing, 2021) has a paradox in its very title, so you can expect to find more of the same within. Through the medium of a tarot-savvy traditional review, Deirdre Danklin reaches her hands in to pull out the paradoxes, and the paradextrous characters, that lie at the heart of the text. ISBN 978-1-98878-471-7 | 336 pp | $23.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY I always get

Read More

USEREVIEW 005: Writers as Psychics

USEREVIEW 005: Writers as Psychics

Books are prophetic in Deirdre Danklin‘s fiction-form experimental review set in a psychic convention, but the books’ predictions reveal more about themselves than they do about their customer coming to have her fortune told. You don’t want to miss this strange little powerhouse review of 8 entire books. #CAROUSELreviews Remember conventions? Lily Dale is full of psychics. Held in an old Victorian mansion, this convention has no humming fluorescent lights, no inky brochures, no laminated

Read More