Commentary |
on The Extinction of Irena Rey, a novel by Jennifer Croft
“Weaving our ecological woes among ancient myths, she nestles the whole lot into a timely saga of translation … embedded in a crafty mystery story. Or is it?”
Commentary |
on The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
“Their critics weren’t afraid to say what they thought. They wrote the way my friends and I talked about the books we read. And they picked titles that weren’t stacked on the tables in Barnes & Noble.”
Commentary |
on The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger
“His remix of Du Fu’s work transports us beyond the boundaries of individual poems and, as far as that might be possible, into the mind that produced these poems … [he is] adamant that his book be taken not as a translation but, instead, as Du Fu’s ‘fictional autobiography.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Trace Evidence, poems by Charif Shanahan — On Giving Up, essays by Adam Phillips — & Tell, a novel by Jonathan Buckley
“Trace Evidence is a beginning that claims no destination, no goal. The destination is unlanguaged. These are poems that appear to have emerged not from a comprehensible ‘I’ but from the disruptions and retardations of the world at large.”
Commentary |
on Wandering Stars, a novel by Tommy Orange
“He pinches grammar and syntax, tweaks switchbacks and inversions, unrolls single-sentence paragraphs with cadences like drum beats. It’s this formal inventiveness that may be the novel’s master stroke.”
Commentary |
on Verdigris, a novel by Michele Mari, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore
“This novel follows some basic narrative beats, but it remains fundamentally stranger than that — due in no small part to the way that Mari employs ambiguity throughout.”
Commentary |
on Creature, poems by Marsha de la O
“The non-duality of god comprises the concurrent potentials of mirroring and witnessing between humans and the natural world, perceiving and perceived creatures. This is a collection with which to experience such uncertainties as if they were sacred. Because they are.”
Commentary |
on Inland, a novel by Gerald Murnane
“Murnane has been variously described as an oddball and a recluse. He himself does little to dispel this impression. At a conference on Murnane held in the small Australian town of Goroke, he was the bartender.”
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).”