Books
-
DISCOVERY KID: Longing for Pig Hearts, Stories, and the “Right” Kind of Knowledge
My siblings stand “at attention,” and salute me before I dole out their chores on individual, handwritten lists. We each have an alias printed on laminated name tags. We go on bike rides. I instruct them to form a line behind me, oldest to youngest, and then circle around to ride behind my littlest sister.… Continue reading
-
Interrogating Whiteness: reading Austin Channing Brown’s “I’m Still Here”
By Sarah Hoenicke for Anomaly Michael Brown was killed just weeks before I began my junior year at a private college in Oakland, California. “Police brutality” wasn’t a phrase I’d considered within an American context. My parents homeschooled my eight siblings and me. Our access to TV, the internet, music, movies, and people outside our church’s… Continue reading
-
25 Years After November 26, 1992
By Sarah Hoenicke for the LA Review of Books blog (BLARB) The focal poem discussed in this essay is included in full, below: November 26, 1992: Thanksgiving at the Sea Ranch, Contemplating Metempsychosis By Sandra M. Gilbert You tried coming back as a spider. I was too fast for you. As you climbed my ankle, I swept… Continue reading
-
A Time to Mourn
By Sarah Hoenicke for Anomaly This month, my plan was to write about two new books, both by white men with the first name John. I wouldn’t usually choose titles with such homogeneity. When I select books, it’s because I think they’ll add to who I am by exposing me to who I am not, and… Continue reading
-
Speaking Up With Beck Levy
By Sarah Hoenicke for the Rational Online In the class we took on nonfiction writing at Mills College, Beck Levy sat at the end of the table facing away from the windows, and the sun at her back made her dark curly hair shine at its edges. She wore a look of intensity on her face… Continue reading
-
Points of Access: Achy Obejas’s “The Tower of the Antilles”
By Sarah Hoenicke for the LA Review of Books “THE MALDIVES,” a story included in Achy Obejas’s most recent collection, The Tower of the Antilles (Akashic Books), is about a woman leaving her cramped, limited home in Cuba for the United States. She’s lesbian, and in the process of being “saved” from her country by… Continue reading
-
Cosmic Disruption: A Twenty-first Century Decentering
By Sarah Hoenicke for Anomaly “It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day,” Annie Dillard writes of a congregation of eclipse-viewers, in her essay, “Total Eclipse.” Dr. Ofelia Zepeda’s poem, “Riding the Earth,” reverses the gaze; instead of people come together looking out at the… Continue reading
-
A Gentle Visit
By Sarah Hoenicke for Anomaly “The visit was a liniment,” writes poet Alberto Ríos in “Coffee in the Afternoon.” A balm for the nerves of two people living in the world, A balm in the tenor of its language, which spoke through our hands In the small lifting of our cups and our cakes to our… Continue reading
-
An American Weakness
By Sarah Hoenicke for Anomaly In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Julia Fierro writes: “Weakness or, to be more specific, showing or admitting to weakness, seemed both un-Italian and un-American.” Fierro is writing here about the impact of Zoloft on her life, and more specifically, her writing career. Before Zoloft, her anxiety and… Continue reading
-
Micro-Review: Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas’s Don’t Come Back
By Sarah Hoenicke for Gulf Coast Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas’s series of essays, Don’t Come Back, is an exploration of belonging and of the ways memory and imagination interact to create history. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas reminds readers that we can still write creation narratives, as she does in four of the essays. There are still stories untold, and original… Continue reading
-
The Choice to Stay: SJ Sindu’s “Marriage of a Thousand Lies”
By Sarah Hoenicke for the LA Review of Books TO BE WHO SHE IS AND NOT DISAPPEAR — this is the great challenge for Lucky (Lakshmi), the main character of SJ Sindu’s debut, Marriage of a Thousand Lies (Soho, June 2017). The marriage ostensibly central to the book is that of Lucky and Kris (Krishna);… Continue reading
-
The Many Homelands of the Mind
By Sarah Hoenicke for the Punch Two literary journals, in their recent issues, put together interesting perspectives on home and belonging Home. Homestead. Homemade. Homegrown. Homeland. Homesick. At home. To home in on—clearly, the concept of home invades much of our thinking, and so, too, our language. Home signifies interior; to be away from it,… Continue reading
-
The Many Faces of Arab Culture: Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses
By Sarah Hoenicke for the Rumpus Most Americans have a simplistic idea of Arab cultures and the variety of experiences within them. We seem to assume that every Arab is religious; that every Arab woman wears the veil, and that it is forced on her; that women have little freedom to be educated, think for themselves,… Continue reading
-
The Secret Life: On Julie Buntin’s Marlena
By Sarah Hoenicke for Brooklyn Magazine “Everyone has a secret life. But when you’re a girl with a best friend, you think your secret life is something you can share,” says Cat, the young narrator of Julie Buntin’s stirring debut, Marlena. Marlena and Cat think, like most teens, that their friendship is exceptional. Marlena begins just… Continue reading
-
On American War, Omar El Akkad’s Tale of the Second American Civil War
By Sarah Hoenicke for Gulf Coast Omar El Akkad’s fiction debut, American War (April, Knopf), envisions a second American Civil War, waged 2074 to 2093, again between South and North. The effects of global climate change have induced a mass-move inland as the coasts are lost to rising seas and frequent, massively destructive storms. The Southerners… Continue reading
-
Jami Attenberg: Listening to Write
By Sarah Hoenicke for Guernica Photo by Zack Smith Photography. You think, because she’s so funny, so sharp, so sarcastic and constantly moving, that Jami Attenberg can’t make you sad. But she can floor you. Fiction like Attenberg’s—entertaining, witty, a swirl of happiness, hope, and disaster—is an escape from daily reality and worry. It’s also a… Continue reading
-
Theoretically Personal
By Sarah Hoenicke for BOMB Resisting confession in Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life “For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading,” Yiyun Li writes in her latest effort, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to… Continue reading
-
BOOKS | The Young Widower’s Handbook
By Sarah Hoenicke for Wales Arts Review In his pleasantly hyperbolic fiction debut, The Young Widower’s Handbook, Tom McAllister engages his readers in the life of Hunter Cady and the memory of his wife, Kait, who dies early in the story. Almost everything we learn about Kait comes through Hunter – his recollections of their conversations,… Continue reading
-
In Conversation with Daniel Lowe
Sarah Hoenicke talks to the author of All That’s Left to Tell, Daniel Lowe, for Wales Arts Review We know that stories have lives of their own, independent of their tellers. They wind and shape themselves differently in hearers’ minds, and then come out slightly transformed in retellings. In Daniel Lowe’s fiction debut, All That’s Left… Continue reading
-
Book Review: The Expense of a View by Polly Buckingham
By Sarah Hoenicke for the Masters Review Our current political conversation often revolves around the financial disparities rampant in American culture. Polly Buckingham’s recent story collection, The Expense of a View, hones in on the lives most impacted by the inequalities this gaping imbalance engenders. Buckingham tells the stories of the system’s most vulnerable—the ill, the… Continue reading
-
Climate Change, Violence: What Can Be Done?
By Sarah Hoenicke for the Montreal Review Sarah: Can you tell me briefly about each of your books? Roy: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a philosophical meditation, in the tradition of Susan Sontag or Camus, on climate change and how to approach and think about climate change from a humanistic perspective (from someone… Continue reading
sarah hoenicke flores 