Current Issue: Fall 2024

Staff Picks

In the original Spanish, Di Benedetto distills his clear and incisive prose down to its indispensable elements. He then breathes life into it with plenty of Argentinian colloquial speech and occasional rhetorical flourishes. These small elements transport the reader to a Spanglish literary space, which an American readership usually associates with a space very different from 1960s Argentina: the South of the United States and the North of Mexico.

– Francesco Fritz, January 2025

Book Reviews

Real Americans chronicles the disparate perspectives of three generations in a single family. Despite their differences, these narratives dovetail into a profound exploration of identity – what defines who we are and how much of it can truly be changed. Real Americans is truly a page-turner, driven by the constant anticipation that a pivotal revelation is just beyond reach.

– Andrew Hu, December 2024

Charleen McClure’s d-sorientation is an exploration of space: the expansive empty inside humans and homes, the various rooms of the self, and how it feels to inhabit them. The selves she explores are alive and dying and dead, they are mosquitoes and mothers, and they are pressing their palms to the walls trying to map this space with their hands.

– Hannah Lui, October 2024

Starving and unstoppable: Albert Abonado’s latest poetry collection, Field Guide for Accidents, traces the paths of a lost poet unraveling his identity and his grief. Abonado uses each of his poems as bread crumbs—leaving behind trails of blood, fruit peels, tongues, and prayers—as the reader attempts to find where these paths converge.

– Diego Carvajal Núñez, November 2024