Commentary |
on Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s by Jennifer Quick
“A sharp reminder that Ruscha’s art began with the know-how and materials of pre-digital advertising, signage, and package design. These disciplines ‘presented Ruscha with a richly layered landscape of forms, images, and methods, as well as a way of thinking and seeing and being in the world'” …
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Tenderness by Derrick Austin & Within the Sweet Noise of Life by Sandro Penna
“Austin will not expend his breath on an unmissable take-away. He demands something from us other than concurrence or empathy. He wants our involvement in the process of discernment.”
Commentary |
on Lapvona, a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
“The novel rests on Moshfegh’s sharpened skills as a storyteller and plotter, her dexterity with twists and sudden reversals that make this bizarre world cohere as a narrative.”
Commentary |
on Jawbone, a novel by Mónica Ojeda, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker
“Jawbone is sometimes a meditation on horror storytelling in all of its forms — and sometimes a full-blown example of it.”
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on Spell Heaven and Other Stories by Toni Mirosevich
“She smartly captures both the daily grind of the lower-middle class and the chip on the shoulder attitudes that simmer within all small towns.”
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on Benefit, a novel by Siobhan Phillips
“A fascinating twist on the typical campus novel … a sophisticated, sharp critique of how capitalism has weaponized meritocracy in a way that has left young scholars in uncertain and underpaid situations.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Aurelia, Aurelia by Kathryn Davis, Son of Svea by Lena Andersson & The Night Albums by Kate Palmer Albers
“Unless art produces experiences and values that art-less life cannot, it’s pointless. Our desire for such art may depend on our prior devotion to the world of people and emotions, but the world alone can’t satisfy our desire.”
Commentary |
on These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, poems by Hayan Charara
“… poems that flicker from bitter to wistful, from sour to serene, often with remarkable compression and a middle-aged sense that epiphany may come too late to matter …”
Commentary |
on Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgement by Greg Chase
“The task of modernist fiction is to ‘remind us of our shared criteria for the meanings of words … describing the world in new ways and, in so doing, revealing the world as it has always been.'”
Commentary |
on Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish) by Abraham Socher
“… Jewish topics, ranging from the Talmudic/Hasidic masters — to 20th-century German-Jewish philosophers such as Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin — to contemporary campus anti-Semitism.”
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on The Hurting Kind, poems by Ada Limón
“She remembers earlier places, interests, and attachments as existing in a time when she had ‘so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.’ Now she assumes that a phone ringing at night is bad news.”
Commentary |
on Best Barbarian, poems by Roger Reeves
“In a complicated poetry that contends with racism, myth, and the current moment, Reeves’ lines are infused with cadences that range from hip hop to the biblical, into a register all his own.”
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on Canopy, poems by Linda Gregerson
“Because Gregerson insists on documenting unsparingly the various harms that we do to both each other and “our one shared life,” she refuses, on those same grounds, to leave herself outside of the frame of reference.”
Commentary |
on 533 Days and Leaving, nonfiction and poetry by Cees Nooteboom, translated respectively by Laura Watkinson and David Colmer
“He observes that out of ‘a combination of arrogance and provincialism,’ English is ‘the world language into which the least is translated … such a meagre harvest that you realise why Americans sometimes understand so little about the world.’”
Commentary |
on Grey Bees, a novel by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
“Reading the novel solely through the lens of current events may obscure some of its central preoccupations, notably its exploration of relationships between men …”