Gulf Coast Books

Reviews • Interviews • et Cetera

Reviews • Interviews • et Cetera

Gulf Coast Editors' Best of 2016 List

The Editors

This year we asked our editors at Gulf Coast to list their five favorite books of 2016. They did just that, and the lists that they provided are in no particular order (it was hard enough for most of us to narrow it down to five). The rules also allowed…


Interview: Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Daniel Peña

Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez is at the forefront of decentering Colombian literature as it's commonly known: the magical realism, the polite political allegories, the associated orientalist gaze that threatens to broad-stroke all of Latin America…


Review: Fred Moten's The Service Porch

Henk Rossouw

On the sprung floors of the Eldorado Ballroom, in Houston’s Third Ward, before Fred Moten read from his new book The Service Porch, he began with a track by Carmen McRae, “Sometimes I’m Happy.” He let McRae’s riff on the jazz standard play through, without…


Micro-Review: Amina Gautier's The Loss of All Lost Things

Corey Campbell

Like many good short story collections, Amina Gautier's third collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, traces heartbreak in its many forms. In these stories, her characters struggle to navigate feelings of disconnection brought on by kidnapping, abandonment,…


Review: Window Left Open by Jennifer Grotz

Carolann Madden

There is an innate holiness to Jennifer Grotz’s newest collection, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). Indeed, the collection itself is marked by the author’s own travels to a French monastery, but more so than that, Grotz’s meditative tone and keen…