Creative Writing Publications

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Isabel Beeman — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:15:18 +0000

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones Isabel Beeman Wed, 04/16/2025 - 18:15

"The best yet from one of the best in the business. An emotional depth that staggers, built on guilt, identity, one's place in the world, what's right and what's wrong. The Only Good Indians has it all: style, elevation, reality, the unreal, revenge, warmth, freezing cold, and even some slashing. In other words, the book is made up of everything Stephen Graham Jones seemingly explores and, in turn, everything the rest of us want to explore with him."

—Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and A House at the Bottom of a Lake.

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The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs by Marcia Douglas

Isabel Beeman — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:12:26 +0000

The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs by Marcia Douglas Isabel Beeman Wed, 04/09/2025 - 12:12

"The adventurous and immersive latest from Douglas, continues the author’s fusion of poetry and prose with a nonlinear tale combining an escape from slavery in 18th-century Jamaica and immigrant life in 2010s America… ‘Time and space are twin,’ Douglas writes, and as she develops this idea in passages that alternate from prose to verse, the novel takes on a trancelike quality. The author’s originality is on full display in this challenging and rewarding work."

-Publishers Weekly

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Archon / After by Ruth Ellen Kocher

Isabel Beeman — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:09:15 +0000

Archon / After by Ruth Ellen Kocher Isabel Beeman Wed, 04/09/2025 - 12:09

"In her frankly feminist ninth collection, Kocher (godhouse) dissects the dangers beneath the male gaze, the specter of which shadows women everywhere...These whip-smart and evocative poems derive meaning from both the darkness and the light, drawing readers in with a beguiling intimacy."

-Publishers Weekly

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Pretty by Jeffrey DeShell

Isabel Beeman — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:03:41 +0000

Pretty by Jeffrey DeShell Isabel Beeman Wed, 04/09/2025 - 12:03

"DeShell is a daring, intelligent, hard-eyed, and tenderhearted writer, all of which is abundantly evident in his wonderful new novel. Jeffrey DeShell has managed to make the form of the crime novel erudite, challenging, and entertaining at the same time. What a wonderful trompe l'oeil, a true literary experiment and adventure."

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Ire Land by Elisabeth Sheffield

Isabel Beeman — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 05:16:17 +0000

Ire Land by Elisabeth Sheffield Isabel Beeman Wed, 03/12/2025 - 23:16

“Elisabeth Sheffield’s Ire Land is an exquisite construction—as sly as Nabokov, as tender as Beckett, deeply intelligent and run through with heart and dark hilarity and great waves of rage and beauty. It possesses an undeniable cumulative power and a level of invention that is both thrilling and poignant.”
-Carole Maso

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Whale Aria by Rajiv Mohabir

Isabel Beeman — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 05:11:43 +0000

Whale Aria by Rajiv Mohabir Isabel Beeman Wed, 03/12/2025 - 23:11

"'For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue,' recounts Rajiv Mohabir’s speaker in “Boy with Baleen for Teeth.” As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters."

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Isabel Beeman — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 04:47:30 +0000

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones Isabel Beeman Wed, 03/12/2025 - 22:47

"A riveting story of heartbreak, death, and revenge, this remarkable work of American fiction, a thought-provoking tale filled with existential terror, unease, and a high body count, transforms, in Jones’ deft hands, from the unapologetic horror novel it most certainly is into a critique of the entire idea of the United States—a critique that, despite the horrors, both real and supernatural, is forcefully infused with both heart and hope."
-Becky Spratford

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Blood, Mud, and Ghosts by Julie Carr

Isabel Beeman — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 04:35:04 +0000

Blood, Mud, and Ghosts by Julie Carr Isabel Beeman Wed, 03/12/2025 - 22:35

“An exquisite mosaic of the cruel and haunting complexities of family, race, property, and political power in the American West. Carefully researched, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is a brave and moving book.”
- AVERY F. GORDON, AUTHOR OF GHOSTLY MATTERS: HAUNTING AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

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Masses & Motets: a Francesca Fruscella Mystery, Jeffrey DeShell

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 22:14:32 +0000

Masses & Motets: a Francesca Fruscella Mystery, Jeffrey DeShell Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/08/2019 - 16:14

Masses and Motets is a tale composed of four basic interwoven threads, corresponding to the four-part choral writing of Pierre de la Rue’s service music. The first thread comes from the diaries of a recently murdered priest, Father Andrea Vidal, former secretary to the notorious Father Marcial Maciel. The second thread is the mystery story, a police procedural focusing on the efforts of Denver detective Francesca Fruscella to solve the murder and retrieve Vidal’s diary. The third strand is the story of Father Signelli, a priest sent from the Vatican to “fix” the murder. And the fourth strand explores the best and worst of Catholic culture: art and music created by Catholic artists and sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

Vidal’s narrative is the story of a priest who systematically, sincerely, and hopefully tries to destroy his very self through sex, drinking, and drugs in order to get closer to God. Fruscella’s story is that of a middle-aged, female detective trying to solve a ghastly murder while constantly battling the sexism of the Catholic Church. Signelli’s tale is that of an older career priest who, in doing the bidding of his superiors to fix problems that threaten the order of the Church, has perhaps compromised his own soul. By no means a simple narrative of wicked priests, this is a story of men who desperately want to believe, as well as a story of what this belief might shelter and cost.

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Noah Eli Gordon's "Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (Solid Objects)" included in The New York Times' April 3 "New & Noteworthy" list

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:32:07 +0000

Noah Eli Gordon's "Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (Solid Objects)" included in The New York Times' April 3 "New & Noteworthy" list Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/16/2018 - 10:32

Noah Eli Gordon's latest poetry collection, Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (Solid Objects) was included in The New York Times "New & Noteworthy" list on April 3. From the NYT: "The prose poems that make up the bulk of this slim book, all of them called “The Problem,” resemble absurdist flash fiction, disrupting reality through juxtaposition and non sequitur."

Noah Eli Gordon's latest poetry collection, Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (Solid Objects) was included in The New York Times "New & Noteworthy" list on April 3.

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