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Oct 30, 2024 | 
therumpus.net | Richard Mirabella
Kyle Winkler lives in Ohio and teaches at Kent State University at Tuscarawas. A long-haired, bespectacled husband and father, Winkler happens to write some of the strangest, scariest, most inventive fiction out there. His stories are literary, emotional, character-driven, and delightfully unsettling. Winkler’s work has been praised by the likes of Dan Chaon, Christian Kiefer, Amber Sparks, and Brian Evanson. Still, you may not have heard of him, as he doesn’t have a big publisher or a publicist.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Richard Mirabella
Nate Lippens’ new novel, Ripcord, a companion to his outstanding debut, My Dead Book, is a novel made of fragments, glimpses, and moments in time. The narrator, a middle-aged queer man living in Milwaukee, meditates on his current situation, a semi-affair with a married man, and the lives of his friends, who are, like him, struggling to make ends meet. Lippens’ novel is brimming with witty asides, pitch dark humor, tenderness, and pain.
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Dec 28, 2023 | 
saveourserotonin.substack.com | Justin Torres |R. Eric Thomas |Richard Mirabella |Melissa Broder
I was originally going to be cute and roundup twenty-three of my favorite reads from 2023, but doing so would have done a great disservice to the remaining bevy of breathtaking books I’ve devoured this year. Even narrowing it down to thirty was difficult, as I have read sixty-four books this year, which is less than my yearly average of around eighty.
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Mar 29, 2023 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Richard Mirabella
The first time someone called me a faggot, I was nine or ten years old. I was standing on the grass near a chain link fence by a baseball diamond. I don’t remember why I was there, the park near my childhood home in Levittown, on Long Island. Maybe my brother was nearby, or my best friend, Suzanne, or my parents. Strangely, I remember the sky, which was blue smeared with grey. Windy, not yet Fall, but close. A boy I didn’t know asked me why when I spoke, I sounded like a girl.
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Mar 15, 2023 | 
memoirmonday.substack.com | Richard Mirabella
I was on the phone with my mother. It was 2017 and I was mid-way through working on the secondish draft of my novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, and we were having the same conversation we’d had over and over. How was it going? What was I doing, exactly, a few years into it? This time, my father piped up in the background. “I don’t understand why he can’t just sit down and write the story from beginning to end! What’s taking so long?”I didn’t understand, either. I was just as frustrated.
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Mar 15, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Richard Mirabella
Queer coming of age is much more than a character discovering or accepting their queerness and moving on. It’s an ongoing struggle toward feeling life, toward celebration of self. My novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, can be seen as a coming-of-age story, but to me it’s really about the disruptions many of us face on our way to growing up, and how sometimes we don’t come-of-age at all, but remain in a middle place, pulled in two directions, toward the past and future.
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Mar 14, 2023 | 
bookshop.org | Richard Mirabella
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The Washington Post, A Noteworthy Book Harper's Bazaar, A Best New Book of 2023 Goodreads, A Buzziest Debut Novel of the Year Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Salon, Vulture, Chicago Review of Books, and LGBTQReads "Richard Mirabella's debut novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, is an eerie, psychologically devastating novel by any measure, but it's Mirabella's careful, emotionally honest rendering of the ever-shifting relationship...
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Mar 13, 2023 | 
musalmantimes.com | Richard Mirabella
In her spare time off from the hospital, Willa works on miniature dioramas, recreating scenes from her brother’s early life. By Willa’s own admission, this obsession stems from “a desire to shrink the world and make it manageable.”As literary devices go, it’s a rather blinking symbol of the way these characters remain perpetually stuck in place. But I would proffer that the book’s atmosphere is less like a diorama and more akin to a snow globe.
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Feb 21, 2023 | 
libro.fm | Richard Mirabella
After years of severed communication, Justin appears on his sister’s doorstep needing a place to stay. The home he's made for himself has collapsed, as has everything else in his life. When they were children, Willa played the role of her brother’s protector, but now, afraid of the chaos he might bring, she’s reluctant to let him in. Willa lives a carefully ordered life working as a nurse and making ornate dioramas in her spare time.
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Jan 27, 2023 | 
netgalley.com | Richard Mirabella
Opening like a fairy tale and ending like a nightmare, this cannonball of a queer coming-of-age novel follows a young man's relationship with a violent older boyfriend—and how he and his sister survive a terrible crimeAfter years of severed communication, Justin appears on his sister’s doorstep needing a place to stay. The home he's made for himself has collapsed, as has everything else in his life.
