Commentary |
on Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America by Kim Phillips-Fein
“As this timely, incisive book suggests, liberty exists for the elect few, the rest of us be damned — a notion as American as Mom and apple pie.”
Commentary |
on Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems by Jeannette L. Clariond, translated from the Spanish & introduced by Forrest Gander
“The poetry strips back the extra, the social, the trauma of living with people, to try to get to a physical, spiritual core that connects us across chronological time and to the physical world.”
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on New York Trilogy, poetry by Peter Balakian
“His work takes on the larger picture of historical formation, human rights writ large, and its accretive echo across time, while also reveling in the very material culture that sustains it.”
Commentary |
on Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, essays by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
“She urges all of us who live primarily in one language to recognize that our seeming linguistic purity or separateness is only an inability to see the differences that inhere between and within languages.”
Commentary |
on Under the Falls, a novel by Richard Russo
“Under the Falls is a thriller, but at its best it’s concerned about that matter of haunting — about whether the child can ever be reconciled with the adult, and who gets hurt along the way.”
Commentary |
on My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, a fiction by Deborah Levy
“The book, which Levy dubs “a fiction” rather than “a novel,” functions as a brief journey through the titular writer’s pioneering career as well as a slice of Parisian life, relishing in wordplay that draws from Stein’s bag of tricks.”
Commentary |
on Best Literary Translations 2026, edited by Arthur Sze
“What sets this anthology apart is its transparency and celebration of the translation process … offering readers a window into the creative, ethical, and at times collaborative negotiations behind the English versions.”
Commentary |
Book Notes — Nonfiction: on Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World by Alyce Mahon, Diaries by Josef Koudelka, The War That Made the Middle East by Mustafa Aksakal & Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger
“In 2004 at age 94, the painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning published A Table of Content, the first of her two poetry collections. Her poem ‘Sequestrienne’ begins, ‘Don’t look at me / for answers. What am I but / a sobriquet, / a teeth-grinder, / grinder of color, / and vanishing point?'”
Commentary |
on Offseason, a novel by Avigayl Sharp
“This novel is often brutally sad; it’s also often brutally funny. It’s neither a comic novel or a tragedy; instead, it’s something much stranger.”
Commentary |
on The Old Fire, a novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
“A strain that runs through Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novels: characters are let down quietly, delicately, the pain, like a pinprick, festering just below the surface.”
Commentary |
on The Eighth Wonder, a novel by Vlady Kociancich, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira
“That Kociancich should have produced such an intricately surreal novel is perhaps unsurprising given that her English literature professor … was none other than Jorge Luis Borges.”
Commentary |
on A Season, poems by Michael Joseph Walsh
“… we each experience our lives as seasons populated by foreigners within. These poems offer a textual reflection of these processes across time …”
Commentary |
on The Butterfly Who Dreamt He Was A Man by Boria Sax
“Sax believes that insects’ lives render them especially suitable for comparison with human concepts and institutions. He highlights insect metamorphoses as a ‘model for human transformations.'”
Commentary |
on All There Is to Lose, poems by Aiden Heung
“Heung’s work touches upon the universal sorrow over the loss of an irretrievable past but individualizes that experience by focusing on the poet’s own loss and pressuring it into something stranger – an ethics of sacrifice.”
Commentary |
on Can We Laugh At That? by Jacques Berlinerblau
“The one who is laughing defines what is funny, including comedy that is provocative or nasty. But at what point does comedy become hate speech issuing from xenophobia, misogyny, bias, or rage?”