Reviews
Performance
In her debut novel, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, Jessie Tu paints a portrait of an artist on the brink. The neurotic protagonist, Jena Lin, was a child prodigy violinist who toured the world before her public breakdown at the age of 15. Now 22, she is rebuilding her career after detouring through a literature degree, although this time as an orchestra violinist, not a soloist.
Rebel Bodies
These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.
Millenarian Pastoral
The Rain Heron is an exemplary work of popular fiction. People can be a little touchy about such designations, so let me stress that I am imputing no deficiency of craft or intelligence or imagination. Quite the contrary. What I mean, specifically, is that its considerable formal accomplishment is its ability to mould its ideas into a conventionally satisfying shape. It is a richly imaginative work that appeals to a sense of wonder and evokes important themes, but it ultimately remains within established and therefore, in the final instance, reassuring parameters.