Ian MacAllen

Book review of Kings County

Book review of Jason Diamond's The Sprawl

Book review Leave The World Behind

Book review of Danielle Evans's story collection The Office of Historical Corrections

Book review of Claire Holroyde's novel The Effort.

Book review of the short story anthology Kink.

Book review of The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Collective Gravities by Chloe N. Clark, word west, $15 paperback, 2020
Reviewed by Ian MacAllen
Few people would have predicted a global pandemic would plunge the world into a collective isolation with the specter of death threatening at every moment. Yet Chloe N. Clark’s debut story collection, Collective Gravities, offers a prescient examination of these anxieties. Several of Clark’s stories even go as far as manifesting the sense that she somehow anticipated the current global health crisi...

Set in the fictional, Hudson Valley village of Clapham, Emma Straub’s All Adults Here explores the city dweller’s pastoral fantasy. Goat farms, a five-and-dime lined main street, and a gilded age manor house serve as the setting for this family drama. All Adults Here follows Straub’s formula of a sprawling cast of intimately connected characters trafficking in secrets, gossip, and fragile egos. The skill of Straub’s writing is balancing soap opera-like plots with substantive emotional potency...

I had always assumed I had prepared myself for the death of my husband, and then the call came from his office: Paul was dead. The ten-week wait for his resurrection felt much longer. From the start, the paperwork had been a nightmare. The restoration company found every excuse to delay. They even refused to initiate resurrection until they received the death certificate in notarized triplicate. I understood the liabilities if they had accidentally duplicated a living person, but the company ...

Burn it Down is a collection of essays by women exploring women’s anger. Editor Lilly Dancyger solicited essays from a broad spectrum of women and presents a variety of different types of anger, from the anger surrounding sexual assault to the anger derived from not being believed by their own doctor. The writers explore the triggers of their anger, the emotional response of the experience, and how anger impacts their lives. Lilly is a contributing editor and columnist at Catapult, runs the M...

Nicholas Mancusi’s debut novel A Philosophy of Ruin confronts the anxieties of free will and fatalist determination. Oscar Boatwright is a professor of philosophy who learns in the opening pages that his mother has died unexpectedly. Adding to his grief, his father has been left penniless. His parents have given away their life savings to the guru Paul St. Germaine. Oscar’s quiet life is upended when he sleeps with Dawn, a student, the night before the term begins. He finds himself caught up ...

We have been living in the future for a while now: drones deliver packages, watches track vital signs, meat substitutes grow in labs. No matter the modern problem, there’s an app for that. Even the self-driving car seems a plausible possibility. Despite these innovations, none of us seem happier for it. Political polarization, melancholy, depression, and existential dread are hallmarks of our time.
In her debut story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South skillfully crafts narrati...

Set in the fictional, Hudson Valley village of Clapham, Emma Straub’s All Adults Here explores the city dweller’s pastoral fantasy. Goat farms, a five-and-dime lined main street, and a gilded age manor house serve as the setting for this family drama. All Adults Here follows Straub’s formula of a sprawling cast of intimately connected characters trafficking in secrets, gossip, and fragile egos. The skill of Straub’s writing is balancing soap opera-like plots with substantive emotional potency...

Art is risky. Art is dangerous. It threatens power structures and the establishment, and thus controlling who is allowed to produce art is an essential feature of fascist governments. We see this conflict today playing out around the world, both abroad and domestically, with the president attacking the press, journalists, and artists critical of him. Censorship and control play a fundamental role in fascism: in the mid-twentieth century, the Nazi German government purged art and artists along...