This poetry collection is Tishani Doshi’s eighth book. The collection is separated into five sections and covers everything from war and the inevitability of death to systemic misogyny, most of it being inspired by events, people, or other published pieces from the past and present.
The Sentence is the latest novel from Louise Erdrich, a prolific, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Ojibwe descent. It is a sprawling work that chronicles main character Tookie’s journey from one-time body smuggler who wanted to impress a girl and earn $26,000 to incarcerated person to bookstore employee and wife. While The Sentence sells itself as a ghost story and is certainly not lacking in the ghost department, it is primarily a pandemic story, illustrating how the onset of COVID-19 affects Tookie, her husband and her stepdaughter as well as her family of bookstore co-workers.
What would you do if, on a random Tuesday morning, you came across a video showing police body cam footage of a werewolf being shot? Would you believe it? Would you care? Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters poses the question: what if everything that goes bump in the night were real and how would we treat them?
“You ever wake up in bed and feel like you’re not...alone?”
Shadows pass through the hallways and rooms. Kitchen cabinets open and dishes show up in places they weren’t before. Voices seep through the walls. And if she hears one more creak in this old, dusty house, she’s going to scream. She tries to brush her fears under the non-existent rug, but a much more sinister truth awaits her.
The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado. Penguin Books, 2021. $16, 276 pages.
What business does a story about segregationist America not wanting (literal) aliens in vintage toy stores have in the same short story collection where readers follow a post-grad,