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Book Notes — History: on The War Within a War by Wil Haygood, The Chosen and the Damned by David J. Silverman & Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945 by Ian Buruma
“This was a war in which less than two percent of officers were Black – even as Robert McNamara and the Pentagon looked to Black neighborhoods to fill General Westmoreland’s request for hundreds of thousands of young men.”
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on Don’t Stop, a novel by Bonnie Friedman
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on Paradiso 17, a novel by Hannah Lilith Assadi
“Sufien, the protagonist of Paradiso 17, would never be as happy again as he was in a refugee camp in Syria. During the 1948 war, when he was five years old, his family was driven out of their home in Safad, Palestine,”
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on Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, a memoir by Terese Svoboda
“‘I should have gotten down on bended knee and thanked my mother-in-law for banging her head against that patriarchal ceiling,’ Svoboda writes. ‘Should have’ are the operative words.”
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on The Vivisectors, a novel by Missouri Wiliams
“… the story of an irrepressible malcontent who, though calm on the surface, denies and resists many aspects of her existence in order to … survive? Be superior? Control everyone else? Deconstruct her own narrative?”
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on To See Beyond: Essays by Anna Badkhen & Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman
“If Badkhen is interested in glimpses of a world beyond the muck of human life, Anne Fadiman keeps a close eye on the world she knows best — her life at home in western Massachusetts and her classroom in New Haven.”
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on The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue & Matthew Hollis
“From the first, his poems dug down into memory to find their source. Or, more precisely, the excavation of memory — both personal and cultural, and the continuity he sought in it — is his subject.”
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on Transit, poems by David Baker
“So many varieties of transit take place, between modes of consciousness, different forms and self-states of writing and reading, awareness of experience, mortality, and textual legacy.”
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on Beckomberga, a novel by Sara Stridsberg, translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner
“Stridsberg’s concerns go beyond the usual fictional conflicts—she’s looking for deeper schisms between the sane and the mad, the living and the dead, despair over our fate and our acceptance of it.”
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on The New Economy, poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
“This doubleness — lament braided with exuberance, suffering braided with awe — structures the emotional, formal, and ethical terrain of the collection.”
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Book Notes: on My Mother’s Silver Fox by Alois Hotschnig; Exercises 1950-1960, poems by Yannis Ritsos; Winter Light by Douglas J. Penick & Winter Dreams by Barbara H. Rosenwein, & Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum
“Ritsos’ testimony is not just about the shedding of blood; he also testifies to behaviors and events that lie beyond our powers of explanation, even as we (or some of us) deplore them.”
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on Turned Earth, poetry by Brad Richard & Hindsight, poetry by Rosanna Warren
“Richard and Warren write poetry that reckons with the mysterious separateness and encompassing closeness that are fundamental to how and what we feel, delivering the paradoxical ‘public face of privacy'”
Commentary |
on Queen, a novella by Birgitta Trotzig, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
“… a gently told tale about harsh happenings, most of which are nothing more uncommon than everyday life during the hardscrabble years of economic depression after the First World War.”
Commentary |
Berlin Shuffle, a novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated from the German by Philip Boehm
“Berlin Shuffle tracks the comings and goings of chance acquaintances connected by larger forces, most significantly the economic catastrophe of late Weimar Germany.”
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on The Disappearing Act, a novel by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
“The narrative follows novelist M who, like Stepanova, has left Russia during the Ukraine war, and is now living in an artists’ residence in Europe, grappling with her new understanding of her home country and herself as a part of it.”