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Cover of Louise Gluck's "American Originality," with a small yellow diorama of a room on white background.

Friday Reads: April 2023

Things are finally warming up here in Western Mass: old snow banks are melting and fuzzy buds are popping up on the trees. Our spring issue—which features a portfolio of stunning fiction from Kuwait, apocalyptic poetry, a Ramadan romance, and a story about a dog in a Texas barrio—launches in just a few short weeks. If you’re wondering where these writers get their inspiration, look no further than this round of Friday Reads. 

Book cover of Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Oyehaug

Present Tense Machine: A Review

OLGA ZILBERBOURG
In Present Tense Machine, Øyehaug offers us the opposite scenario: the connection between a mother and her child is severed completely by their lives splintering into parallel universes in which the other has been forgotten. Øyehaug’s narrator attempts to persuade us that even in this situation, the connection between a mother and a child would remain, however tenuous.

cover of June Gervais's jobs for girls with artistic flair

Review: June Gervais’s Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair

SUSAN SCARF MERRELL
Rarely is a book as delightful as June Gervais’s debut novel, Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair, a story of people who do their best to be better and then fail and try again with courage and integrity. These characters cannot be dismissed or ignored, because they don’t give up.