Ian MacAllen

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...

In January, Josh Denslow’s story collection Not Everyone Is Special began appearing on the most-anticipated preview lists that get passed around the internet among the literary elite, where it was described with adjectives like “quirky” and “hilarious”. My interest was piqued. Then there was the fact that Denslow’s publisher, the relatively new 7.13 Books, is run by Leland Cheuck, who founded it with the explicit mission of seeking out stories and books that may not appeal to larger publisher...

At the southern border of the United States, the Trump administration continues to commit various crimes against humanity. The optimistic among us hope Trump and his team eventually suffer a comeuppance. For the families experiencing it, revenge fantasies likely do little to attenuate the trauma. Their oppression remains ongoing and unabated.
Our immigration crisis creeps into the life of the unnamed protagonist in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. Like most of us in a place of relati...

Friendr
The first orientation video promises that the Friendr app can provide a fulfilling experience for both the client and the associate. I was not looking for a fulfilling experience. I just needed the money.
The second orientation video warns against specific behaviors for associates: no touching, no sexual contact, and absolutely no circumventing the app when arranging a Friend Encounter. The video consists of colorful animations reducing these rules into childish cartoons narrated by a...

The metaphor hidden in the Garden of Eden fable is that ignorance is a blissful paradise, while eating from the tree of knowledge exposes us to the miserable rot of existence. Adam and Eve’s journey of self-discovery occupies Jo, the narrator of Paradise Rot, the debut novel by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval. A first-year student, Jo arrives in a foreign, English-speaking university town, bemused and wide-eyed, eager but vulnerable. By the time she departs, her experiences have hardened her.
T...

THE coup began just after 1:00 p.m., local time, while we passed obliviously overhead. I was on my third sunrise. Five hours would elapse before I heard anything. There had been no tanks, only bank clerks who drained the President’s accounts. There were no warplanes or missiles, only television airwaves controlled with a flipped switch. There had been no assassins; the rebels simply took control of the president’s social media, his website, his email address. The whole thing ended before anyone could tweet it. By then, the president was as tame as a LOLcat, sanitized for t-shirts sold at Urban

The birth of a first child is a seminal moment. Parents prepare as best they can, but the challenges of newborn can destabilize even the most committed partners. Even in the best conditions, maintaining a relationship doesn’t always work, and nothing will prepare a new parent for the death of their infant.
In calamity, people seek solace in identifying some tiny error they’ve made as though by acknowledging it, they can correct the damage wrought. Correcting the mistake doesn’t always work, b...

I met Chelsea at a book launch party when Lauren Cerand, the publicist, introduced us. I recognized her name from literary events around New York City, but hadn’t heard her read. She promised to send me a copy of her forthcoming book, Tonight I’m Someone Else, and a few days later it appeared in my mailbox.

I began reading the collection with curiosity. My first reaction was how she had captured a certain kind of melancholy. Throughout the essays, we see a constant struggle to fit in, like wh...