Julián Herbert’s mother is dying from cancer in the Saltillo University Hospital. He sits by her side, keeping notes, remembering her life as a runaway and a prostitute, cataloging their family’s slow ascent into the middle class, sharing, at times, in her fever dreams. His bedside thoughts become the novel Tomb Song, a piece of…

Grief is unwelcome and, like an unwelcome guest, has a way of sticking around long after the party’s over, chairs are stacked, and the light’s turned out. Working around grief’s hidden edges, that’s what we struggle with, like breathing through glass. Paula Bomer’s exceptional new book of essays, Mystery and Mortality: Essays on the Sad,…

“What is autobiography but a story rich and impossible of completion—an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure? What can I say to you, therefore, that will be true, and will cast its shadow or its light over the whole body of my telling, of my being here, or who I am?” -from Winter Hours by Mary…

It’s tempting to write off Notes From My Phone* as a gimmicky attempt at memoir without fully plunging into the self-indulgence of writing about oneself. The contents of this book started as notes that Michelle Junot left to herself on her phone. At the urging of Mason Jar Press, they were shaped into a collection of…

I first met Chris Wiewiora in 2008 when he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was the managing editor at The Florida Review. Chris came on as our assistant editor on work-study and quickly proved that he was one of our hardest working staff members. His work ethic and…

I stumbled upon The Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, by James Grissom, last summer. I saw a photo of Williams on the cover, and that was enough for me. I got more than I bargained for. I finished the book while sitting on a playground bench, as my husband…

Many would argue that the main goal of literature, like most other forms of art, is to entertain. After all, we’re frequently so bogged down with the stresses and struggles of real life that we rely on these creative efforts to generate enriched escapism in which we become and interact with drastically dissimilar people in…

Rob Roberge’s Liar is a memoir, not so much about re-living the past, but rather trying to put the past together through a series of flashbacks. Written in nonlinear excerpts and vignettes, Roberge seeks to make sense of a past full of alcohol, drugs, relationships, murders, and music. The nonlinear narrative makes complete sense, as…

The multiple modes of the erasure and self-erasure of women’s voices sit heavy with me this morning. I’ve read a beautiful and daring text entitled Women and Ghosts, by Kristina Marie Darling, which is part essay and part prose-poem, all experimental, where line-throughs, footnotes, multiple narrative lines, and alternating gradients of text are used to…

In the throes of my divorce a couple years ago, I heard Elizabeth Bishop in an old radio interview pointing out that we humans get divorced all the time. She was answering a question about the damage divorce might inflict on children. My son was 5 at the time and I pulled my car over, trembling,…