A few snapshots from summer blurbs and reviews…

Nothing Vast – by Moshe Marvit
Acre Books, forthcoming fall 2024

“Nothing Vast is a rich, intelligent and lucid multigenerational narrative, spanning contexts and continents, weaving archival work with fiction, intertwining the catastrophic histories that make up the stories of nations with the small vicissitudes and moments of mercy that undergird individual lives. This book offers a compelling depiction of trauma, ideological fervor, dispossession and buried memories, both individual and collective; of the siren’s call of violent nationalism, which ultimately offers a false and hollow facsimile of redemption; and of the impact of all of this on the human heart, and soul.”

Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home – by Jessica E. Johnson
Acre Books, 2024

“[Mettlework] is a story of isolation and the quest for human connection. It is a story of family dynamics and gender dynamics—and the awareness it takes to break those patterns, if desired. It is a story of the vast, enmeshed systems that harm us here in the United States and the infinite decisions—tiny, colossal—we must make if we want to untangle and alleviate our oppression. The book’s underlying question: how do we best take care of this world?”

Survivor’s Notebook – by Dan O’Brien
Acre Books, 2023

“In Survivor’s Notebook, through the more flowing, capacious prose poem, there is a less precipitous feel, more an expansive mood of intensive searching, and, often, an onward rush of packed mental busyness and racing novelistic flights. . . . The prose poem is a good choice for [O’Brien’s] roaming quest, as it allows him to channel free-flowing, often turbulent, thoughts and feelings. Rather than a sense of completeness to each piece, the reading sensation is more in medias res throughout. . . . Each lucid fragment is a part of the whole shattered mosaic of restless living.”