Commentary |
Book Notes: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş & Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated from the German by Damion Searls
“In abandoning some of the market’s rules of fiction – Savaş invites us to experience the renewable rules of expression — the old ways of being new — that are in play when an artist is performing at the sublime height of her art.”
Commentary |
on Mina’s Matchbox, a novel by Yoko Ozawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
“Ogawa beautifully captures the intricate emotions of a child who desperately wants to belong. And how relatively short intervals of our childhood can take on an outsized significance.z’
Commentary |
on Go Figure, poems by Rae Armantrout
“The poet’s latest collection is rich with allusions to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and other man-made dangers. Such themes pair well with Armantrout’s iconic version of Language poetry and her interest in quantum physics.”
Commentary |
on What I Know About You, a novel by Éric Chacour, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss
“From the bustling streets of Cairo to the quiet solitude of Montreal, this novel is a sweeping saga of family secrets, cultural clashes, and the sacrifices made in the name of love.”
Commentary |
on Life After Kafka, a novel by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker
“The couple’s relationship was mostly an epistolatory one – except for a brief vacation together in the spa town of Marienbad – and is buoyed by the 600 letters and postcards that Kafka wrote to Felice.”
Commentary |
on Ice, poems by David Keplinger
“An homage to fragmented forms of ancients solidified in ice and lost to the living world, a requiem. At the same time, the poetry retains the elegiac dimensions of his personal losses.”
Commentary |
on Question 7, a novel by Richard Flanagan
“Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.”
Commentary |
on The Material, a novel by Camille Bordas
“Her surprising premise fuses, and neutralizes, two hack expectations: that MFA students tend not to be great at taking jokes, and that comedians tend not to be great at taking criticism.”
Commentary |
on Van Gogh and the End of Nature by Michael Lobel
“There’s a dialectic between planting scenes in Arles, emblematized by figures of plowmen and a Sower, and smoke-capped townscapes in the background, teeming with chimneys …”
Commentary |
on The Caricaturist, a novel by Norman Lock
“The events of The Caricaturist are framed by the jingoism that attended the United States’ imperial ambitions generally and the Spanish-American War in particular.”
Commentary |
on Proverbs of Limbo, poems by Robert Pinsky
“Pinsky is our great poet of ambivalence, who asks: how can an artist participate in a culture so hostile to that artist’s existence? And yet, to be dispossessed is to lay claim to all.”
Commentary |
on poetry by Eugenio Montale: Late Montale, translated by George Bradley, and Butterfly of Dinard, translated by Oonagh Stransky & Marla Moffa
“The later poems reveal ‘the essential features of the aged poet’s cast of mind: his sardonic self-deprecation; his skepticism regarding grand theories … his Shakespearean conviction that life is a theatrical performance of, at best, indeterminate import.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes — Fiction: on The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada & Swimming in Paris by Colombe Schneck
“By luring us into the severities of this character’s psyche, Zaher simply dispenses with our feel-good ethics, not because those ethics are bad but because they are weak.”
Commentary |
on The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo
“an extended inquiry into how a wide range of artists have managed to sustain their vision — how they’ve kept their other eyes open throughout the length of their artistic careers.”
Commentary |
on Here After, a memoir by Amy Lin
“She is no longer able to sleep, work as a teacher, laugh genuinely, attend to others, or imagine any kind of viable future. She quickly discovers that people are terrified of her suffering — even when she attempts to demonstrate what she calls ‘Good Signs’.”