Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise

If you’re hunting for some fresh fiction from a small press, check out Gilbert Allen’s newest book, The Beasts of Belladonna. This book features fifteen linked tales of quirky characters in a South Carolina foothills community. Expect the unexpected in these unsettling yet often hilarious stories, in which characters rub up against their own failures, yearnings, and secrets.

A minister nails a bird to a couple’s front door; a woman accidentally kills her cat and finds an unconventional way to grieve its loss; a man’s foxy neighbor goes to outrageous lengths to destroy his marriage. Domestic animals have a hefty influence on these people’s lives, sometimes comical and sometimes tragic; the same could be said about church as we’re introduced to the Mosquito Ministry, the Faster Pastor Challenge, and couples who pass witty notes during sermons. We meet “treenappers,” a Grandfather Against Garbage, and a character known as the Jesus of Malibu, and in these encounters are powerful flashes of raw humanity in all its complexity.

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The Beasts of Belladonna by Gilbert Allen. Slant Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

Guest Post by Robert Lamb

It was Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman who said, “War is hell.” If you have any doubt that the general was dead right, run and get a copy of The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. You’ll see war up close and personal in his excellent account of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Hamilton, a Richmond, VA writer and former Peace Corps volunteer, shows us through the eyes of a young Christian girl in Armenia how war unleashes unspeakable human savagery in the name of ethnic cleansing.

It is April 1915 and the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, which has lasted for centuries, is on the verge of defeat by the allied forces of Great Britain and the Arabs. In the novel’s first few pages, the heroine, Valia, a teenager, sees her parents, siblings, and neighbors, all Christians, murdered by Turkish “police soldiers,” and flees for her life.

Thus begins an odyssey the reader won’t soon forget. The author’s account of Valia’s struggle to stay alive and hopeful is a hymn to the human spirit, and the story is nothing short of realistic and gripping.

Adding a nice touch of realism, even Lawrence of Arabia and Arab Prince Faisal make cameo appearances near the story’s end.

OK, film producers; you can’t say I didn’t give you a heads up on this novel.

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The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. Winter Goose Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Robert Lamb is the author of four novels and a book of short stories; he review books for the New York Review of Books; and he has a website at www.robertlamb.net.

Guest Post by Jack Graham.

It’s incredibly rare that a novel can leave you feeling as ecstatically powerless as Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being, a strikingly well-crafted novel following the tribulations of both Naoko Yasutani, an early 2000’s teenager and of the more contemporary character of Ruth—an uninspired author reading the diary of the aforementioned Japanese teen.

Ozeki’s texts demonstrate a handshake between two separate periods within time, misting and tearing apart any conceptions of what it means to be ‘contemporary.’ The reader is simultaneously inundated with early references to popular and zany Japanese Maid Cafès and Hello Kitty merchandise (a Japanophile’s dream) in the form on Nao’s diary whilst Ruth provides a far more grounded account of modern normality—one of mundane and domesticated living.

When reading from the perspective of Nao, a readership is forcefully delved into an environment mostly motivated by suicidal thoughts. Being a Western reader, it became increasingly intriguing to be given some understanding into a Japanese mindset in regards to the romantic sentiments surrounding self-killing, one very foreign to my own.

On the other side of the coin, however, Ruth is a character who lives a decade or so after Nao’s accounts, the physical embodiment of dramatic irony. As a reader of Nao’s diary, she can locate Nao within time, using the internet as a tool to fixate her somewhere after 2001 but prior to the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Incident of 2011—she’s a literary archaeologist of sorts. It is through Ruth that I, the reader, was stripped of all control. It is at Ruth’s pace of reading that we unveil the life of Nao, it is only at the will of her determination that I found myself turning the page, heavy with anticipation.

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A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Penguin Random House, 2013.

Reviewer bio: I’m Jack Graham, currently studying my Masters in English Literary Studies at Durham University.

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Guest Post by Eric P. Mueller 

Rarely, if ever, is the narrator of a novel so personal that it’s like they’ve invited you for tea. Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Francisca does that and more, balancing colloquialisms and two languages with stage-speaking authority. Readers learn a lot and a little of Francisca—she is at least in her mid-20s while telling her story, but we mostly stay locked in on one special summer.

Fiebre Tropical reminds readers of monotony that can ensue during long breaks in high school. Living in Miami with little freedom and resources to explore her surroundings, Francisca is limited to watching her neighbor play computer games, watching telenovelas with her abuela, and interacting with the faith-based community her mother almost forcefully wants her to join.

Christian communities are ubiquitous and highly accessible for youths. This novel explores what happens to identity when one joins these spaces. Will Francesca the all-black wearing “heathen” be transformed by God and his followers, or will followers of Christ find themselves shadowed in Francisca’s queer darkness?

Lopera alternates languages almost seamlessly, creating an authentic intimacy that makes the novel’s tone fresh and inviting as opposed to alienating. The distinct voice keeps the novel consistent; as the reader traverses through the plot, they learn more about Francisca’s mother’s and grandmother’s histories, explored in a way that’s not far off from a Junot Diaz or Toni Morrison book.

The novel explores the relationship between mother and daughter, generational trauma, immigrant experience, coming of age as queer, and queerness repression. The book is also about heartbreak. With the pandemic quarantine reminding us of what it means to be powerless and stuck at home, Fiebre Tropical is a reminder of the vulnerable yet necessary act of connection, of it’s rewards and consequences.

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Fiebre Tropical by Juli Delgado Lopera. Amethyst Editions, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Eric P. Mueller is an essayist based in Alameda, CA. His work has appeared in Foglifter, Thought Erotic, and elsewhere. He reads for Longleaf Review. Follow him and his two dogs @realericmueller on Twitter or Instagram.

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Guest Post by Manasi Patil

Marybeth, Hollister and Jane is a fictional story set in the rural area of  Callicoon, New York.  The book has a very realistic vibe to it and all the characters seem believable. It follows the journey of a handful of people trying to locate the Eagle Diamond, stolen in the 1960’s. At the start, most of them are from the same organization, LVAJ, whose job is to locate stolen arts, artifacts, etc. and then pass them to someone else. But as the story unfolds, the head of the organization, Peter Reece, is too weak to manage the organization, and eventually all the members separate and begin the search on their own.

All through the journey of reading this book, I was on a rollercoaster. The scenes are sketched out in a way that makes the words leap off the page. All the characters too, are perfect for their roles. Author Vera Jane Cook has done an exceptional job. I particularly like Brock Stanley with his wise, witty, and caring nature (for Jane).The unexpected twist of The Sisters and Jane was my favorite scene from this novel.

The ending could have been much better, though. It winded up too simple and easy and I felt that the story had promised a different sort of end. Nonetheless, Marybeth, Hollister and Jane is a great read, and I will certainly be reading more from this author.

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Marybeth, Hollister and Jane by Vera Jane Cook. Chatter Creek Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Manasi Patil is a young author with a passion for writing.

Guest Post by Amy Ballard

Which is more important, the clan or the individual? In Jean Auel’s 500-page series opener, Cro-Magnon Ayla navigates the customs of her adoptive Neanderthal people while pondering what it means that she is “Other.” To assimilate, she must comply with clan rules with which she disagrees. Sometimes she chooses defiance. When her practice of hunting with a sling (a man’s privilege) is discovered, she is placed under a death curse. Ayla isolates in a secret cave, an apt metaphor for the forced solitudes of today’s coronavirus pandemic. As clan political dynamics shift, she must determine whether she can live under the rule of a leader who, despite her valued status as a medicine woman, systematically abuses her.

Since its publication in 1980, the novel and its five sequels in the Earth’s Children series have generated a body of criticism, favorable and unfavorable, around its historicity, feminism, and treatment of race, among other topics. For the quarantined in 2020, though, The Clan of the Cave Bear does what it emphatically must: transport the reader to another world.

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The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. Penguin Random House, June 2002.

Reviewer bio: Amy Ballard writes and teaches in southern Idaho. Her fiction has appeared in Barely South Review and elsewhere. Find Amy at www.amyballard.com.

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Guest Post by Jacqueline Williams

Given to me as a birthday gift, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a manifesto on shared solitude and the different ways in which we try to overcome grief. One of the intriguing things about the book is the author’s choice to leave the narrator unnamed along with most of the characters. However, at no point does that choice prove as an obstacle to the reading experience; instead, it renders visible particular details about the personality of the characters thereby allowing the reader to connect more deeply with them.

The book is a fairly easy read about the narrator’s journey of simultaneously losing and gaining someone and the idea of collective grief. As literary fiction, the book is peppered with trivia on various literary writers such as Adrienne Rich, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka among many others. The characters too draw from the similar flavor of what it means to be a writer and the conflicts attached to the profession of writing.

My favorite part of the book is the bond shared between the narrator and Apollo the Great Dane. Nunez’s take on the human-dog relationship is unlike any other. She is spot-on in her representation of the contemporary nature of company that of being alone, together. She writes, “What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and greet each other?”

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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books, February 2019.

Reviewer bio: My name is Jacqueline Williams and I’m currently pursuing M.A in English. My field of interests includes Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Medical Humanities.

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