Marlena by Julie Buntin

“Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Buntin’s riveting, assured debut novel Marlena. For Cat, a librarian and avid reader, storytelling is crucial, and she struggles to recount a tragedy from “a period of [her] life so brief, it was over almost as soon as it started.” Within the first few pages of the novel we learn that Cat’s best friend Marlena died, “suffocat[ing] in less than six inches of ice-splintered river,” when the girls were teenagers. Cat has never believed that what happened was “pure

culture August 03, 2016

White Nights in Split Town City by Annie DeWitt

It is fitting that White Nights in Split Town City, the strange and striking debut novel by Annie DeWitt, opens with "When" by Sharon Olds, a poem that pairs atomic dread with the familial.

It is fitting that White Nights in Split Town City, the strange and striking debut novel by Annie DeWitt, opens with “When” by Sharon Olds, a poem that pairs atomic dread with the familial. A young mother hears a “noise like somebody’s pressure cooker / down the block, going off.” Holding her small daughter, she steps outside onto the lawn and sees a bright ball in the sky—they watch it “rise and glow and blossom and rise.” Surprisingly, the poem ends not with an image of apocalyptic terror, but one of grace: the child reaching up, arms open to the searing light. White Nights is the study of