The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher The Hollow Places opens with a life in turmoil. T. Kingfisher introduces us to her protagonist, Kara (also known as Carrot), as she moves into her uncle’s museum of oddities following a disruptive divorce. The nostalgic setting and friendly faces help put her at ease, but a disturbing discovery shows her that terror is right around the corner or, more precisely, through a strange hole that appears in a wall of her uncle’s beloved museum. Inside of this opening, Kara discovers a passage to another world. The Hollow Places follows Kara and Simon, an…
The Oldest College Literary Magazine in the Nation
From November, 2020
Sunday Staff Picks: November 22nd
Must I Go by Yiyun Li Lilia, an 81-year-old mother of five, grandmother of seventeen, and widow of three, is the anchor of Yiyun Li’s new novel “Must I Go.” Jaded and apathetic, Lilia is described first at the beginning of the novel in third-person narration; we later come to know her more personally through her annotations in the posthumous diary of Roland Bouley, an ex-lover. Her brief notes, assumed to be scribbled on the margins of the diary’s pages, recount the short affair they had when she was a teenager, which resulted in her pregnancy with his daughter, Lucy,…
Sunday Staff Picks: November 15th
Pricks in the Tapestry by Jameson Fitzpatrick The thread that ties together Jameson Fitzpatrick’s writings in Pricks in the Tapestry is not linear; there is neither chronology nor anachronism, development nor necessary trajectory. Stanza to stanza, page to page, poem to poem, speaker to speaker: the speakers don’t strive to be unified or explained. Forming a carefully tangled web, the the collection constitutes various selves submerged in a confusing world of sex, gender, race, class, family, and history. The force that moves the reader across the web from locus to locus, allowing disparate ideas and feelings to connect to one…
Sunday Staff Picks: November 1st
Obit by Victoria Chang Grief scatters us. In Obit, Victoria Chang attempts to put us back together. Chang writes to document her mother’s 2015 death and her father’s 2009 frontal lobe damage, but her poems truly rest in the innumerable micro-deaths in between. The death of the mother is simultaneously the death of the mother’s teeth; of appetite; of language; of hindsight; of Victoria Chang. The book largely consists of 70-odd obits: vertical, dense, tombstone-like poems, each dedicated to a specific loss. Through this rigid form, she entertains, and ultimately rejects, the objectivity and finality of newspaper obituaries. Instead, Chang…