Stephanie Ash’s The Annie Year (Unnamed Press, October 2016) has all the components of novels I like: strong, conflicted women, small town perils (lethargy, meth), youth that do things like ruin annual high school musicals.
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Who is Miwi La Lupa? Besides being a talented multi-instrumentalist, La Lupa is a singer-songwriter in his own right who just released Beginner’s Guide, his third solo album, and, if you’re anything like me, maybe it’s just the type of music you need right about now.
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It isn’t just the album of the year, it’s the one we need to get through it. A track-by-track annotated guide to Hiss Golden Messenger’s Heart Like a Levee.
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Music sounds better in LA. I don’t know why, it just does. I suspect Angel Olsen knew this when she went out there to record My Woman, the follow-up to 2011’s critically lauded Burn Your Fire for No Witness, an album that’s still to this day as calming at times as it is haunting.*
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The truest physical expression of human empathy may well be to cringe: the grimace, the shoulders drawn to the ears, eyes narrowing or going shut. Cringing is an involuntary response to another’s humiliation or pain that reinforces compassionate connections with others.
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Something crucial to understanding the world of Kristine Ong Muslim’s collection Age of Blight is revealed in its wonderfully weird story “Zombie Sister.” Once clinically dead, the narrator’s sister, Beth, has returned to life, of some sort (the attending doctor is casual, commenting, “Every family has one”).
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