Commentary |
on The President Shop, a novel by Vesna Maric
“Maric skillfully guides us around the usual question of ‘Who started the war?’ towards reframing our perspective about history itself. Our modes of examining the past are insufficient.”
Commentary |
on Out Of Place, a novel by Diane Lefer
“‘I’d write my own, or my confession, or my evidence, or whatever They want, but no one gives me paper or pen. Instead, I’m reduced to thinking!’ Lefer asks, if you’re stripped of light and food and comfort and kindness, what stories will you have planted in your mind?”
Commentary |
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, edited with an introduction and notes by Merve Emre
“Emre’s annotations illuminate how profoundly Woolf was responding to the experiences of illness and war in a novel full of both interiority and community, both suffering and life.”
Commentary |
on Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows by Arthur Lubow
“One of the pleasures of Lubow’s biography is watching him establish a balance between acknowledging the novelty of and critically assessing Man Ray’s iconoclastic output. His descriptions and critiques are spry and astute.”
Commentary |
on The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, stories by Brian Evenson
“Evenson’s 22 short, potent stories force the reader to constantly question what is real and what is imagined … accomplishing this feat by lulling the reader into a fugue-like state with his otherworldly imaginative prose.”
Commentary |
on The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, a novel by Joshua Cohen
“Cohen pointedly and often hilariously deals with themes of anti-Semitism, assimilation, academic politics, and family dynamics. In addition, he provides information about the political history of Zionism — critical to understanding Ben Zion’s philosophy and a key to his middle son Bibi’s political behavior.”
Commentary |
on Hao: Stories by Ye Chun
“The new book deepens especially into the terrain of mothers and their offspring, and into the challenges of protecting and nurturing children in circumstances imperiled by abandonment, racism, poverty and violence.”
Commentary |
on Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson
“Unlike many female authors of her day, Elizabeth never hid her identity with masculine pseudonyms, even when she was very young. Over time, she contemplated going further; political and moral thinking emerged in her work and she became ‘a true abolitionist.'”
Commentary |
on Red Crosses, a novel by Sasha Filipenko, translated by Brian James Baer & Ellen Vayner
“When Putin says Belorusians and Russians share a common fate, it is up to dissenters like Filipenko to advocate for his people’s independence. But he is a novelist after all, not an op-ed writer – so while Tatiana maintains that she could never denounce anyone, Sasha responds, ‘If humans have really accomplished anything, it’s the ability to negotiate with their own conscience.'”
Commentary |
on The Playwright’s House, a novel by Dariel Suarez
“Moral complexity can be lost when a novel has an antagonist as unyielding as the Cuban government is to the Blanco family — but here the lid placed upon these characters creates a high pressure world in which the importance of every action is magnified.”
Commentary |
on Ghosts • City • Sea, poems by Wang Yin 王寅, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
“… a chronicle and commitment to uninterrupted labor, a reaction to the haunted world that persists through stages: a struggle to overcome, a struggle for equilibrium and healing, and the dogged pursuit of joy.”
Commentary |
on Wild Animals Prohibited, stories by Subimal Misra, translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
“… analysis merges with surrealism, prose can be read as poetry, parallel storylines give way to metafiction, fonts shift size, and charts appear for reader participation. Techniques pile up, and the only constant — the only thread necessary to bind the collection — is Misra’s sense of unpredictability.”
Commentary |
on Prepare Her, stories by Genevieve Plunkett
“The convincing realism of her meditative prose, the way she limns setting in Vermont, and the development of characters who are often in a state of emotional stasis, all entice the reader to proceed.”
Commentary |
on Colorful, a novel by Eno Mori
“A deceased soul who ‘committed a grave error’ before its death, eliminating a chance of rebirth, wins a heavenly lottery granting it a second chance — a one-year residency in a borrowed body of someone on earth — and once they realize ‘how big [their] mistake had been,’ they will be reborn.”
Commentary |
on Last Summer in the City, a novel by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated by Howard Curtis
“… ultimately a melancholy novel, but one with a peculiar brightness. It makes a retreat from the world feel charming — that there’s a way out from the stress of the world, until, alas, there isn’t.”