Commentary |
on Generations, a memoir by Lucille Clifton
“Clifton’s ability to summon the dead is a hallmark of her work. As Toni Morrison remarked, ‘She is comfortable and knowing about the dead.’ Clifton’s dead come alive, are present, and take a seat at the table.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Chess With My Grandfather, a novel by Ariel Magnus, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude & The Notes by Ludwig Hohl, translated from the German by Tess Lewis
“For Hohl, the true summit for the writer is the path uphill itself. But then, he will trouble the path in one of his notes: ‘In the mountains. We saw the paths of others, brilliantly illuminated, but not our own.'”
Commentary |
on Every Day the River Changes: A Journey Down the Magdalena by Jordan Salama
“The dead arrived by river: people who had been murdered somewhere upstream and were ‘discarded in death, dumped into the Magdalena, and carried away by the current’ past Colombia’s riverside towns and villages …”
Commentary |
on Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things in Between, essays by Padgett Powell
“Writers who strive to study and capture the milieu of the South may rejoice that long-time University of Florida creative writing professor Padgett Powell has finally released his first book of nonfiction.”
Commentary |
on American Bastard, a memoir by Jan Beatty
“Research shows that the separation of infants from their biological mothers can cause changes in brain chemistry and a failure to thrive. Babies born in hospitals are no longer separated from their mothers as they were in the 20th century when doctors viewed infants as blank slates who had no attachments or emotional vulnerabilities.”
Commentary |
on Course Of The Empire, photography by Ken Light
“One of his images alone would suffice to tell the tale, but this collection is about tragic scope, a troubled situation so vast that one must keep moving to encompass it. Many subjects are not seen so much as glimpsed.”
Commentary |
on The Pastor, a novel by Hanne Ørstavik, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
“The Pastor, like Love, is about insularity and the gulf between people. But now Ørstavik is working from the inside, and the tragic struggles of people, especially disconsolate young women, are foregrounded.”
Commentary |
on Orwell’s Roses, essays by Rebecca Solnit
“Art unrelated to political questions can, she suggests, “reinforce a sense of self and society, of values and commitments, or even the capacity to pay attention, that equip a person to meet the crises of the day.”
Commentary |
on The Magician, a novel by Colm Tóibín
“Tóibín’s lingering sadness may be one of the interior sources that compelled him to plunge into the psyche of Thomas Mann who spent his entire life in the closet. They share some key life experiences.”
Commentary |
on Paris, poems by Richard Jones
“… a book of recollection and retrospection in which the poet acts as a flâneur, strolling the streets of the resplendent city while cultivating new responses to what he finds.”
Commentary |
on Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl
“Because Amazon is concerned about customer satisfaction first and foremost, the company has reframed the novel as, McGurl writes, ‘an existential scaling device, a tool for adjusting our emotional states toward the desired end of happiness, however complex or simple a state it might be.'”
Commentary |
on Snapshots 1971-77 by Michael Lesy
“His selection process positions the snapshot as the container for secrets, something only family or close friends know. And yet, he also has an eye for when something is off — something added, or missing, or unusual.”
Commentary |
on Worldly Things, poems by Michael Kleber-Diggs
“For this poet, the pivot from a guarded interior to the troubled world is an embedded, anxious, recurrent, public gesture that seeks to understand itself.”
Commentary |
on Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert
“The horror of his near-lynching recurs in nightmares; he can never gain enough distance from the trauma. One could also surmise that even into old age he chased after a mother’s love — perfect, unconditional, all-healing, intuitive.”
Commentary |
on Civilizations, a novel by Laurent Binet, translated from the French by Sam Taylor
“Binet possesses the rare ability to write wherever on the literary spectrum he chooses. This time, he’s presented us with a novel that is silly and fun and clever. And as the world we live in grows more chaotic, we can acknowledge there’s nothing wrong with that.”