Kathleen Rooney

  PANTHEON, APRIL 2022, 208 PP. Titling a book can be a tall order —finding the perfect, concise combination of words that announces your aim to an audience and entices them to read it. Margo Jefferson’s latest electrifying work of nonfiction, Constructing a Nervous System, is superbly titled. A nervous

BIBLIOASIS, NOVEMBER 2022, 240 PP. IN 1846, THE British writer William Thoms coined the compound word folklore to describe “the traditional beliefs and customs of the common people,” replacing prior terms popular antiquities or popular literature. Lore in this coinage derives from learning or instruction to evoke the way in

GRAYWOLF PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the

GROVE ATLANTIC, JULY 2022, 356 PP. HORROR IS A genre full of feminist potential. In a talk at the 2020 Horror of the Humanities, an annual Halloween event hosted by DePaul University, philosophy professor and Humanities Center Director H. Peter Steeves made the point that horror is an excellent vehicle

MCD January 2022, 224 pp. The dedication of Morgan Thomas’s debut fiction collection Manywhere reads, “For Bea, who introduced me to Frank, and for anyone who’s gone looking for themselves in the archives.” That spirit of searching drives this keen and coruscating set of nine short stories centered on Southern