The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya / Soft Skull Press / 224 pages / 978-1593766788 / 2018 “Life’s not worth living if you’re not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!” (“The Women”, p. 154) You don’t always know what you’re getting into when you pick up a book. Only when you begin reading, when the first few pages begin to leave an … [Read more...]
The Anna Karenina Fix by Viv Groskop, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko
The Anna Karenina Fix by Viv Groskop / Harry N. Abrams / 978-1419732720 / 2018 The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature is more than your average memoir, beginning with its title. A kind of dark literary joke I still can’t help but chuckle at, Groskop uses it to set the stage for a well-balanced and thoughtful exploration of Russian classical literature … [Read more...]
Dispatches from the Mushroom Kingdom by Noel Pabillo Mariano, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko
Dispatches from the Mushroom Kingdom by Noel Pabillo Mariano / Hyacinth Girl Press / 31 pages / $6.00 Questions of the spoken/external and unspoken/internal sort are at the heart of Dispatches from the Mushroom Kingdom. The chapbook takes elements from video games, especially in regard to structuring, in order to explore loss, memory, the possibility of reconciliation as … [Read more...]
