Commentary |
on Dispatches From the District Committee, a novel by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton
“Although Sorokin’s more satirical aspects seem like they could be used to recreate an accurate portrayal of the society he’s mocking, there are other moments that feel more prescient in their ire.”
Commentary |
on Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction by Andrea Barrett
“Barrett: ‘I had little sense … of how essential chaos is, how great a role serendipity, intuition, and timing play. How much waste is essential.'”
Commentary |
on Exit Zero, stories by Marie-Helene Bertino
“The cumulative effect of reading the new stories is that you feel changed by them, intoxicated, as if you expect something very different from reality after having tasted Bertino’s version.”
Commentary |
on Bumblebees, poems by Deborah Meadows
“Bumblebees has the kinetic energy of recycling, rearranging, assembling — not simply a way to look at art, but also a method we can follow in our attempts to mitigate the planet’s degradation.”
Commentary |
on You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems, a poetry chapbook by Rebecca Foust
“Foust’s precise language is the ultimate rebuke to forces seeking to erase ‘our shared & stored history’ and she’s frank in expressing the limits of what an individual can do against state-sponsored confusion.”
Commentary |
on Ultramarine, a novel by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus
“The protagonist is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship who, despite a typical childhood of family, school, and love, always felt different, and prone to taking flight and disappearing.”
Commentary |
on The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI, by Fred Ritchin
“The social utility of photojournalism has eroded as images are Photoshopped, morphed, repeated, and politicized in ways that make even outsize tragedies feel mundane.”
Commentary |
on Take My Name but Say It Slow, essays by Thomas Dai
“How do you identify yourself when traditional modes of identification, right down to your very name, are troubled? Take My Name is essentially a catalogue of the methods, all imperfect, that Dai has chosen.”
Commentary |
on Is Art History?: Selected Writings by Svetlana Alpers
“Alpers is at home with theory but prefers to stand in awe before Vermeer and Velázquez, absorbing, one-on-one, larger questions of chronology and technique.”
Commentary |
on I Don’t Care, stories by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Chris Andrews
“Many of the stories grapple with the question posed in Kristóf’s memoir: ‘What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left my country? More difficult, poor, I think, but also less solitary, less torn. Happy, maybe.'”
Commentary |
on Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir by Vidyan Ravinthiran
“Ravinthiran offers us another metaphor of selfhood, and a new kind of autobiography, one for a late capitalist world in which we must think of global priorities and of selves that exceed national borders.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: Novels — on I’ll Come To You by Rebecca Kauffman, Paradise Close by Lisa Russ Spaar & Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
“I’ll Come To You is a record of how Kauffman enacted her approach to a mystery – what do people actually want from each other, and what gets in the way of providing or receiving it?”
Commentary |
on Past Lives, poems by V. Joshua Adams
“When the ‘I’ appears in Adams’ poems, it’s not to offer the stamp of emotional authenticity, but to take advantage of the many masks that a skilled raconteur can adopt.”
Commentary |
on Poems That Dance and A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon
“We talk about art embodying ideas and feelings, but I think it’s worth talking about poems — some poems, at least — as bodies unto themselves, bodies a mind can make …”
Commentary |
Book Notes, Nonfiction: on The Cities We Need by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, What Nails It by Greil Marcus, The Picture Not Taken by Benjamin Swett & The Age of Reconstruction by Don H. Doyle
“She observes neighborhood life and the diverse work of housing activists, artists, community gardeners, small business owners who stimulate our thinking about and cultivate the gratifications of dailiness.”