The Reading Experience

Issue Two

The second issue of Long Story Short: 500-word Reviews is now available.

Includes reviews of:

    The Ancestry of Objects (Deep Vellum), by Tatiana Ryckman

   Sea Above, Sun Below (River Boat Books), by George Salis

    The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster (Sublunary Editions), by Eric Chevillard

    Ire Land (a Faery Tale) (Spuyten Duyvil), by Elisabeth Sheffield

    Fucked Up (Expat Press), by Damien Ark

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New Review

. . .However, it seems to me that this novel itself undermines the notion that its value should be attributed primarily and most importantly to its status as a vessel for a character’s immediate experience. Surely a more direct representation less dependent on artifice would be the more expedient means of relating [the protagonist's] activities and perceptions. Not only has Rawding chosen to render “experience” through a work of fiction, already a displacement of life as lived and therefore less trustworthy as a conduit to reality, but the novel she has written is formally intricate enough that it threatens to seem entirely superfluous to the goal of simply communicating the protagonist’s experience. 

My review of Loie Rawding's Tight Little Vocal Cords (Kernpunkt Press) at Full Stop.