Author: Kelly Hydrick
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
“But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the…
The Most Important Stories of Our Time: Anthropogenic Climate Change in Fiction (Part 3)
Climate Change Reading Suggestions In Parts One and Two of this climate change and literature series I explored whether climate change is well-represented in fiction. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that modern literary…
The Most Important Stories of Our Time: Anthropogenic Climate Change in Fiction (Part 2)
Part One of this series outlined a brief history of climate change and charted how the numbers of non-fiction climate change publications have changed over time. The enormous spatial and temporal scope of climate change…
The Most Important Stories of Our Time: Anthropogenic Climate Change in Fiction (Part 1)
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Jessamyn West (To See the Dream, 1956) Introduction “In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and…
Book Review: Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Provocative as in to provoke, as in to provoke interest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation I greatly enjoyed Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey’s…
Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt
*Note: This review has been updated (as of 1/25/2020) to reflect the controversy surrounding the author and her depiction of the migrant experience, a story that she arguably had little right to tell. I failed…
Metropolitan Stories by Christine Coulson
She would walk along that basement corridor for another twenty-six years, each day cut and folded by the belief that just beyond the museum’s worn paths and daily rituals, there lies the possibility of something…
Habiburahman’s First, They Erased Our Name
TEN years ago I volunteered as an English as a Foreign Language tutor for a refugee resettlement agency in central Pennsylvania. During that time I worked with a Christian Karen family from south-eastern Myanmar*: father,…
Evening In Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin
Recently, BookBrowse sent me a copy of a short story collection by “one of America’s best kept secrets”: Lucia Berlin’s Evening In Paradise: More Stories. Berlin evokes Shirley Jackson (minus the gothic vibes) and Raymond…
Review: Michael Schmidt’s Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
LET’S start with a confession: I am a historian and I have never read Gilgamesh. I didn’t read it in graduate school. I didn’t read it in college. I didn’t even read an excerpt in…
