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 …
Gregory Pardlo's collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was shortlisted for the NAACP Image Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.. His other honors include …
Tim Z. Hernandez’s first nonfiction work, All They Will Call You , is sharp and decidedly sobering. With this his sixth book, he investigates and reveals the stories of several of the twenty-eight …
Lo Kwa Mei-en’s second collection of poems, The Bees Make Money in the Lion , is a loaded, postmodern experience. As if to channel versions of dystopia, Mei-en crafts poems that embrace the notion …
Language itself forms the vital, visceral engine behind WoO , Renee Angle’s new collection of prose poetry. In this creative rewriting of the lost first draft of The Book of Mormon, Angle positions …
More than twenty years into a distinguished writing career, celebrated author George Saunders is publishing his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, out February 14). “Bardo” is a …
time when the turning birds silver time exploding brined like sweet lemons time wolves bark skunks slip into coops fishing line knots up roads slick proud with ice the boys I fuck all eat candy
The only Korean word I know is oma,/meaning mother. I sit across from her in the low light of the Korean restaurant/downtown. We hold rice paper menus/up to the candle's glow...
In silence, the women gather. Girls draw together, jostling to get in front of the camera, but once they are there they don’t know how to behave. One chews her hair, the other gesticulates, losing …
This year we asked our editors at Gulf Coast to list their five favorite books of 2016. They did just that, and the lists that they provided are in no particular order (it was hard enough for most of …
"Tigue has a storyteller's eye for digging up the roots of trivia; she uses them to fasten together the poem’s emotional nerves."
Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez is at the forefront of decentering Colombian literature as it's commonly known: the magical realism, the polite political allegories, the associated orientalist …
Ford Over is a collection of word and image from writer, interpreter, and translator John Pluecker that takes as its source material the language of colonial explorers and cartographers—travelers …
These new, abstract, modestly sized paintings (most are smaller than four feet square) by David Aylsworth are strangely familiar yet entirely different than this Houston-based painter’s previous …
On the sprung floors of the Eldorado Ballroom, in Houston’s Third Ward, before Fred Moten read from his new book The Service Porch , he began with a track by Carmen McRae, “Sometimes I’m …
Like many good short story collections, Amina Gautier's third collection, The Loss of All Lost Things , traces heartbreak in its many forms. In these stories, her characters struggle to navigate …
Karyna McGlynn’s new poetry collection The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost On Her Way to the Execution offers a visceral, seductive exploration of language and sound. McGlynn’s narrator is eerie but …
The best poems in Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby’s Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse , an anthology of commissioned still life poems, take to heart the central focus …
There is an innate holiness to Jennifer Grotz’s newest collection, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). Indeed, the collection itself is marked by the author’s own travels to a French …
I first met Claire Vaye Watkins shortly after her collection Battleborn came out, at a reading at Susquehanna University, smack in the middle of Central Pennsylvania—all that green, those rolling …