What I was relieved to discover was that San Francisco isn’t dying; instead the people and characters that make the city fun are still out there and bringing the city to life. Sure, at the restaurant I went to, I traded an indoor table for an outdoor parklet, but when a fellow single diner turned to me, nodded, then recommended a couple of plates he was eating, it felt like a taste of what I’ve long loved about the city.
Words, though they seem limitless in quantity, tend to exist within boundaries: What you can understand or learn through the vessel of language, you can just as easily misunderstand or forget. In his sophomore poetry collection Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar shapes language into prayer, into body, into patchwork — clarifying only what can be known.
Like both Black Mirror and Russian Doll, Sarah Zachrich Jeng's The Other Me resists categorization, blending the impossible with the probable with the downright plausible. Kelly Holter has some choices to make no matter where she winds up, and that may be the most important message her creator has to impart. It will be interesting to see how Jeng combines psychology and thrills in her next book, especially if she keeps her characters' emotions in mind.
With a pacy plot and a protagonist you feel for, Gold Diggers blends magic, mythology, alchemy and melodrama into a story about anxiety, assimilation and ambition (“the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents”). Indian immigrants, we’re told, were “duty bound to live out” the American dream. But “what does it mean to be both Indian and American?”