Commentary |
on Come Back in September, a memoir by Darryl Pinckney
“Pinckney’s growth is a function of his understanding the limitations of the circle that’s invited him in — its intellectual distance from the crises they write about, its interpersonal dramas, its whiteness.”
Commentary |
on Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, nonfiction by Rachel Aviv
“There is a disconnect, Aviv argues, between the psychiatric establishment and ‘the stories through which people find meaning themselves,’ and no clear sense of how to close the gap.”
Commentary |
on Bluest Nude, poetry by Ama Codjoe
“Codjoe alerts us to the possibility of wholeness, where one is not alone but accompanied by lineages through which we may attempt to build our own homes, selves, and mythologies.”
Commentary |
on Let No Once Sleep, a novel by Juan José Millás, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead
“Her deepening obsession is revealed through a tattoo she emblazons on her pubis: Nessun dorma, which translates as “Let No One Sleep,” an aria from Turandot.”
Commentary |
on Infinity Network, poems by Jim Johnstone
“A spare and sculpted collection that fearlessly explores the outermost range, reverb, and implications of identity politics and techtopia as pale substitutes for human vitality and interdependency.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Among the Almond Trees, a memoir by Hussein Barghouthi & Rose Royal, a novella by Nicolas Mathieu
“As Barghouthi walks through the countryside near Ramallah, sometimes with his son Áthar, he meditates: “I must return to the dormant child in me, so as to walk the earth as a child-prophet, if not in this life then in the next one.’”
Commentary |
on Cocoon, a novel by Zhang Yueran, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
“The nuanced discussion found in Cocoon is not happening publicly in China today. Any reappraisal of the past is absent from their National Museum, and an under-the-radar institution dedicated to an open accounting of the Cultural Revolution was shuttered in 2016.”
Commentary |
on Lucky Breaks, stories by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky
“The people of Donbas have asserted that their compatriots ignore their voices. Belorusets remedies that deficit through her focus on the small, the trivial, the impassioned observation of the beliefs and actions of the women who stayed, fled, and live in between.”
Commentary |
on They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to ‘Mad Men’ by Kathleen Courtnay Stone
“‘As an “eight-year old girl sitting crosslegged on the living room floor,’ she looks at her father’s law school yearbook and wonders why his class consisted of ‘more than a hundred men in jackets, ties, and trim haircuts, and maybe ten women'”
Commentary |
on Way Out West, a novel by Wyn Cooper
“For all its zaniness, Way Out West documents the struggle of two people grappling with their demons so that they can confront the larger demon taking shape in front of them.”
Commentary |
on Bad Handwriting, stories by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore
“Where lesser authors shy away from shaping unlikable protagonists, Mesa leans into their flaws and abrasive tendencies, sinking her audience into the sludge of humanity and capturing a truer sense of the world.”
Commentary |
on Copy by Dolores Dorantes
“Through deconstructed dictionary entries and syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence which insinuates an experience of violence: a person’s disappearance from a country, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration.”
Commentary |
on Time Shelter, a novel by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
“For a novel that’s intricately enmeshed with European history, it also feels deeply relevant to the situation the United States now finds itself in …”
Commentary |
on The Book of Goose, a novel by Yiyun Li
“The novel is haunted by dead babies, dead mothers, dead siblings, dead soldiers… Fabienne and Agnès recognize that this world has no interest in them, aside from their inevitable fate — to work, marry, quite possibly die in childbirth …”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Mothercare by Lynne Tillman & Canción by Eduardo Halfon, translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn
“Although Halfon wants us to feel the grip of history on our necks, his books aren’t pronunciamentos disguised as stories. His interest lies in how the remnants of family history influence one’s identity and manner of thought.”