Reading Recommendations
Book Reviews
The Best (Dead) Father Stories
Today is my father’s birthday. He died over twenty years ago and far too young. In 2017, I wrote a piece about him that was published in the anthology Sleep is a Beautiful Color. Afterward, SmokeLong Quarterly asked me to…
Wait Till You See Me Dance
With “Likable,” the opening story of Wait Till You See Me Dance, Deb Olin Unferth throws us into the pitfalls of social anxiety, one of the themes threading her impressive new story collection.
In the Dream House
Machado’s writing is clever, poetic at times, and sharp when it needs to be. The structure of her memoir in very short chapters is the perfect vehicle to tell both a personal tale and dissect the mechanism inherent in the…
What You Have Heard Is True
What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyne Forché is one of these books everyone should read. Even if you normally don’t read memoirs. Even if you’re not that interested in repression and resistance. I chose this book because I’d…
La Chambre Claire 2018
The Best Short Prose Published Online in 2018 According to Claire There were stories I loved that I didn’t include. There were probably stories I would have loved, had I read them. So the list below is non-exhaustive and unfinished,…
Diary of a Bad Year by Coetzee
In Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee narrates the story of an elderly writer who meets a young woman in the communal laundry room and asks her to type out his essays. The book itself is interlaced with these essays…
