Paige Cooper

Vicki Gendreau operates in a mode that oscillates between nihilism and sincerity, a whirl of impenetrable irony. Nothing Gendreau writes is true or serious, but everything is.

Set-Point might seem effortless in its easy, acerbic veneer, and the affectlessness of its language might be confused for a kind of apathetic neutrality, but to mistake it for either is to be the butt of the book’s joke. Parker is here to remind us: nothing is easy.

What is happening now, here, to us? The question recurs throughout Melissa Bull’s first collection of short fiction, The Knockoff Eclipse, which could double as an index of quotidian humiliations and indignities. The answer, it seems, requires that we learn to recognize and name injustice where and when it occurs.