Speculative book reviews
Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read. We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation.
We hope to publish several each issue. Typically, we imagine these reviews to be no longer than 1000 words. We'll be accepting reviews starting with our next submission period.
Clea / Colin Hamilton
Generations of middle-age men in both fiction and reality have found themselves unnerved by adolescent flowering, and the story of their humiliating, doomed pursuit is one we know well. Wallace inverts this tale.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast / Leila Philip
By the time we finish we know we are in a version of Alice’s wonderland where no means yes and yes means no, and size is a matter of timing and perspective.
Of Curses and Beauty: The Memoirs of Mario Praz / Robin Hemley
Perhaps hidden in a secret compartment of a burnished cherrywood desk with ebony accents on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, Of Curses and Beauty is kept, admired and reread by the museum’s docents, but otherwise kept under wraps, the true nature of Mario Praz jealously guarded.