Commentary |
on The Librarianist, a novel by Patrick DeWitt
“His novelistic strengths shine in this looser, picaresque form through which he can follow his comedic instincts without worrying too much about getting back on track.”
Commentary |
on Some Problems with Autobiography, poems by Brian Brodeur
“What gives us the authority to speak about our own experiences, let alone those of others, when memory, motivation, and intention are such fallible things? These are some of the questions that Brodeur raises.”
Commentary |
on Ravage & Son, a novel by Jerome Charyn
“… an entertaining street crime novel – but more, a story about social issues including LGBT shame, class struggle, immigration standards, antisemitism, and balanced journalism.”
Commentary |
on Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by James Grieve
“This volume gives readers new to Proust an approachable point of entry — a moderately long book not bogged down in announcements of lofty cultural importance — and longtime readers a new position from which to interact with Proust.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey & Out of the Sugar Factory by Dorothee Elmiger, translated from the German by Megan Ewing
“Nettel emerges as a master of not telling too much while guiding us toward a complex vision of the familiar … she withholds ‘insight’ and simply lets us witness things while deftly managing the novel’s tension.”
Commentary |
on My Men, a novel by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls
“Kielland’s main interest is in imagining the psychological struggle that Belle Gunness, the first female serial killer recorded in US history, may have endured.”
Commentary |
on Live In Suspense, poetry by David Groff
“… the traumatic echoes of the AIDS crisis and the double consciousness of the speaker, who experienced it as a lethal reality that still resonates within him even as it becomes historical for others.”
Commentary |
on Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street by Jackson Lears
“Lears’ goal is to pin down the biography of a single complex idea, resurrected by John Maynard Keynes’ realization ‘that the key to investor confidence is the presence of animal spirits — the spontaneous urge to action,’ also known as life force.”
Commentary |
on Dreaming the Mountain, poems by Tuệ Sỹ, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen Ba Ching and Martha Collins
“For Tuệ Sỹ every river is both its surface and its depth, its present and its past, and every life is a blink of lightning or, maybe more precisely, a dream.”
Commentary |
on Calligraphies, poems by Marilyn Hacker & Collected Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Although the pair differ from one another in their concerns and methods, they share a durable — and sometimes quirky — mastery of prosody that is unmatched in contemporary verse.”
Commentary |
on Austral, a novel by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
“Fonseca is telling us we are losing the world, our worlds, and in the process, our ability to remember and honor our past. But as he has said, ‘I think that in a world obsessed with endings, literature must provide the path for new futures.'”
Commentary |
on Second Star and other reasons for lingering, lyric prose by Philippe Delerm, translated from the French by Jody Gladding
“Delerm packs big ideas into small packages … intelligent observations and terse judgments laden with wit.”
Commentary |
on Feast, poems by Ina Cariño
“The poem becomes an argument that one study of the body be informed by another, that our language and the memories we index might offer a way forward.”
Commentary |
on Excursive, poems by Elizabeth Robinson
“… a poetry of witness that is also meditative, imbued with spirit — and sometimes great wit. She understands that nothing stays, that words multiply their meanings.”
Commentary |
on The Last Songbird, a novel by Daniel Weizmann
“Before you know it, what began as an ordinary run-out written in a pedestrian style soon shows flashes of street-level lyricism and incisiveness.”