Commentary |
on My Heavenly Favorite, a novel by Lucas Rijneveld, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
“This novel can be as shocking as its predecessor, The Discomfort of Evening, but is narrated by a pedophile, alternately rapturous and castigating, who details how he preys on a distraught teen desperate to be seen and understood.”
Commentary |
on Under the Wings of the Valkyrie, a novel by Sjón
“’What am I doing here?’ I asked. ‘This is your interview with me,’ he said. ‘You’re going to let me ask you questions about Under the Wings of the Valkyrie?’ ‘Yes!'”
Commentary |
on How We Named the Stars, a novel by by Andrés N. Ordorica
“As in the long novelistic tradition of portraying the paradoxes of love, here love is both an idealizing filter and a force that pierces the facades.”
Commentary |
on The Possessed, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
“… a kaleidoscope of Gombrowicz’s subjects, themes and intrigues, chief among them illicit desire, class dynamics, and the wish to get to know oneself while fleeing with disgust in the opposite direction.”
Commentary |
on Where the Wind Calls Home, a novel by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
“… a mercurial political climate, stressed family relations, the horrors of Civil War, the voice of a dying teenager, and the mysticism of the natural world in a tightly packed novel depicting the traditions of a Syrian Alawite village.”
Commentary |
on No Judgment, essays by Lauren Oyler
“Does Oyler know that her negative reviews have had an impact? Sure. Does she care? She doesn’t … not care, but observes that caring too much about it is playing a different game than what the critic does.”
Commentary |
on The Upstate, poems by Lindsay Turner
“The poems generate a sense of depletion. They also come across as casually and glancingly violent (roadkill and dogfights), generic (strip malls and parking lots), and contaminated (haze and smog).”
Commentary |
on The Other Profile, a novel by Irene Graziosi, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand
“Graziosi senses that recovering our humanity, preserving it, keeping it away from the marketplace, can move us to desperate behavior.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Wings of Red, a novel by James W. Jennings, February 1933, nonfiction by Uwe Wittstock & The Rainbow, a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
“Jennings understands that the artifice of autofiction works to create the illusion that there is no artifice. It’s the artful illusion of truthfulness, rigged up from that oldest of tricks, the mixing of the recalled and the invented.”
Commentary |
on How To Draw a Novel, essays and drawings by Martín Solares
“Solares uses the how-to as an occasion for thinking about form and beauty — and, most movingly, for reflections not on the novel but on what the novel does to us.”
Commentary |
on The Body of the Soul, stories by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
“Ulitskaya not only resists the totalitarian regime, but also certain cultural and literary gender clichés. These stories mainly feature female protagonists, many of whom do not conform to traditional gender expectations.”
Commentary |
on Postcards from the Underworld, poetry by Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by the poet
“… sequences that offer subtle, intuitive glimpses into the psyche, where the interior dramas caused by human experiences of traumas and coercions take on lives of their own.”
Commentary |
on Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin
Perlin: “At the very moment when languages are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door.”
Commentary |
on Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague by Christopher Neve
“Neve here finds his own ‘late style,’ an equivalent in words for the transformations he identified in Constable, Titian, Soutine and John.”
Commentary |
on A Volga Tale, a novel by Guzel Yakhina, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon
“Steeped in the human history of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Soviet regime, Yakhina’s A Volga Tale matches the power and majesty of that great river.”