Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
Before opening Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin Press, 2018), you might get caught up observing the portrait on the cover. Like many neoclassical paintings of women, Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of a Young Woman in White is of a porcelain skinned beauty, rosy cheeked and cherry lipped, in a revealing negligee. She sits on a chair, probably in a bedroom, staring off…
Shorts are mini digital fictional stories that exist in the space between short story and novella. They’re published through England-based Platypus Press and include emerging and established authors such as Leesa Cross-Smith and Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, as well as past Portland Review-contributor Kristen Arnett. Each of the shorts described below live in the realm of relationships, and more specifically, in the universal truth of marriage and family and…
Rosalie Knecht’s newest novel Who Is Vera Kelly? (Tin House Books, 2018) aims to answer the difficult question posed in its title. In large part, it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in the sixties. But unlike the classic bildungsroman, this noveldefies the reader’s expectations and blurs the lines of genre. It is at once a period piece set partially in South America during…
Julie Whipple’s Crash Course (Yamhill Canyon Press, 2018) is a lucid and engaging examination of a tragedy that occurred in the city of Portland. On December 28, 1978, a DC-8 jet airliner plummeted out of the night sky and crashed in an empty lot located on East Burnside, costing ten people their lives. Whipple’s account invokes the “tick-tock” tension of a thriller, the drama of the courtroom trial, and the cool-eyed analysis…
In creating New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (forthcoming August, 2018), editors James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro combed through print and online journals, individual collections, and literary anthologies for short gems. All of the one hundred and forty stories included in this W. W. Norton & Company anthology are individually less than three hundred words. Though brief, these narratives are deep. In the anthology’s forward, Robert Shapard notes the length of stories has been…