Commentary |
on Losing Music, a memoir by John Cotter
“He’s working to find the correct way to describe what Ménière’s is and does — and, falling short of that, looking for the right words for the flailing.”
Commentary |
on House of Cotton, a novel by Monica Brashears
“As a Southern Gothic tale, the novel is marked by the strangeness of its characters and propelled by their complex behaviors. Whether living or dead, black or white, each person in Brashear’s Knoxville hides a secret …”
Commentary |
on Bard, Kinetic by Anne Waldman
“While there are many routes through this memoir composed of many kinds of texts, my compass as reader points toward an intersection between oral performance and political action.”
Commentary |
“A Sudden Tremor in the Air”: on Two Novels by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
“His Bogotá is constantly in turmoil; its citizens are often depicted as ruined by uncontrollable events that seem tangential to their lives.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on A Cowardly Woman No More, a novel by Ellen Cooney & This Is Not Miami, nonfiction by Fernanda Melchor
“I’m a very ordinary writer in that everything in my life is material,” Cooney said in a 2020 interview. “It’s mostly an issue of when to use what, and how.”
Commentary |
on Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories, translated by Damion Searls
“Harold Bloom listed nearly all of Mann’s works among his canon for the 20th-century. But what is the canon? Which works are worth remembering and why, who determines this, is there a single canon or a multitude?”
Commentary |
on I Have Some Questions for You, a novel by Rebecca Makkai
“The novel’s chief virtue is that it has consumed the true-crime tropes — the way it exploits certain moments for comic relief or forced gravitas, and sidesteps them.”
Commentary |
on A Sensitive Person, a novel by Jáchym Topol, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker
Topol’s Europe is chaotic and hazardous, filled with injustice and its legacies, inequality and desperation. It is also a comedic, picturesque, hopeful place …”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Abyss, a novel by Pilar Quintana, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman & Hourglass, a novel by Keiran Goddard
“Quintana is a master of restraint and the paced accumulation of significance. Even as the actions her narrator describes are harsh and reckless, Quintana wants us to regard such emotional turbulence in the mother as familiar, widely shared among women, and perhaps insoluble.”
Commentary |
on Well-Kept Ruins, non-fiction by Hélène Cixous, translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic
“Return is impossible not because the past remains sealed, but because the opposite is true: time does not pass at all, and Osnabrück’s history of violence has never ended, and has never been confined to Osnabrück.”
Commentary |
on Forbidden Notebook, a novel by Alba De Céspedes, translated by Ann Goldstein
“A story of mothers and daughters, mothers and sons — about a country trying to regain a sense of purpose — about how the values of a generation may be interrogated by one that follows — and about a family.”
Commentary |
on Sonnets With Two Torches and One Cliff, poems by Robert Thomas
“… a considerable contribution of these poems is their continual presentation of consciousness experiencing the act of self-reflection – until it yields transpersonal insight within which to protect love from the world …”
Commentary |
on Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies That Made Me the Wreck I Am Today by Todd McEwen
“If this book had a voice-over, it would be a combination of William Holden in Sunset Boulevard and Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, wise-asses narrating from beyond the grave.”
Commentary |
on Eastbound, a novella by Maylis de Kerangal
“We encounter Aliocha traveling in a cramped and dirty carriage, along with fellow conscripts from Moscow who don’t have the resources or ingenuity to escape their military service.”
Commentary |
on Couplets: A Love Story, a novel in verse by Maggie Millner
“There’s less of an intention to reclaim the beauty of older forms and more that there was no other form appropriate to give a voice to her speaker.”