Commentary |
on An Image of My Name Enters America, essays by Lucy Ives
“If there is a throughline connecting these five investigations — of what we know and how we know it — it is what underlies all realizations: that what we are told is often a painful lie.”
Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie & A Day in September by Stephen Budiansky
“The year 2003 was a challenging one for Ernaux. The previous October, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer; in January, her infusions began, which coincided with the first of the photographs.”
Commentary |
on St. Matthew Passion by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
“Schnackenberg breaks a fourteen-year silence with a paean to sound: the collection does not so much meditate on Bach’s sacred oratorio as levitate from it.”
Commentary |
on The Hormone of Darkness, poems by Tulsa Otta, translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk
“… elegantly twisting structure and vocabulary to tell a story of acceptance and openness and hope among chaos. A culmination of the skills of a queer poet and a queer translator …”
Commentary |
on The Talnikov Family, a novel by Avdotya Panaeva, translated from the Russian by Fiona Bell
“Panaeva was 27 when she penned the manuscript in 1847. It was slated to be published — under a male pseudonym — in Sovremennik, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary journals of the era … The future was not to be.”
Commentary |
on Water, Spiderweb, a novel by Nada Gašić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
“… a classic police procedural before turning its focus squarely onto the financial inequality, shifting morality, and desperate alienation that arose after the initial euphoria of Croatian independence had faded.”
Commentary |
on Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings, edited by Zinga a. Fraser
“She saw the American people as more principled than the more sordid aspects of its history. Even so, she told everyone one of us to beware of the allurements of power …”
Commentary |
on The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
“Ultimately, she calls for limits on ‘the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our technoenthusiasts,’ not by stifling innovation but rather through ‘a commitment to our shared humanity.'”
Commentary |
on The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls
“The translator does not ‘capture the spirit’ of the foreign text, as translators are so often told, but is affected by the foreign text. Searls’ best advice is to remain open to the experience of reading the text, not to capture it.”
Commentary |
on Daywork, poems by Jessica Fisher & Scattered Snows, to the North, poems by Carl Phillips
“A complex mixture of ‘bluntness and grace, directness and song’ to which W. S. Merwin attributes the unique tension and power of Thomas Wyatt’s verse attracts me devotedly to the work of Jessica Fisher and Carl Phillips.”
Commentary |
on Playground, a novel by Richard Powers
“Humanity thrives, Powers means to say, when we can write a story that’s optimistic … And if we allow technology to help write the story — as if plugging the whole of society into ChatGPT — won’t we wind up in a better place, maybe?”
Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: on The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris, Mortevivum by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh & Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans
“When violence occurs and people are killed, injured and distressed, what do we want or expect to see? What does the ‘high tolerance for black death’ say about our media?”
Commentary |
on Grief’s Alphabet, poetry by Carrie Etter
“Grief may give Etter her alphabet — grief in particular over her mother’s death — but with formal virtuosity that seems almost effortless and improvisatory, Etter makes out of that alphabet a book of deeply moving poems.”
Commentary |
on Mothersland, a novel by Shahzoda Samarqandi, translated from the Russian by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
“Samarqandi asserted in a radio interview that ‘Tajik women need to learn to express their opinion freely, to be able to say what they like and what they don’t like, starting from a very young age. They need to know their rights, that they are free to choose who to be friends with, who to start a family with.'”
Commentary |
on Cloud Missives, poetry by Kenzie Allen
“Allen’s collection seeks to calibrate an audience attuned to irony and misinformation, a correction that’s necessary before she can say anything in earnest. In doing so, she also resists the eurocentric demand to explain Oneida culture …”