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 …”
Commentary |
on Paradais, a novel by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
“Paradais distills a theme Melchor explored in her acclaimed 2017 novel, Hurricane Season — the way sexual abuse of women turns into an accepted ritual, and how women are scapegoated even in the midst of their violation.”
Commentary |
on Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems From Gaza, poetry by Mosab Abu Toha
“In the wake of this theft of land and life, Abu Toha deals in the currency of words as the only wealth left to him, with the poem itself as the coin of the realm.”
Commentary |
on Brisbane, a novel by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
“… a meditation on the nature of music (and art in general), a love letter to the written word, and a nascent inquiry into whether one can be simultaneously Russian and Ukrainian after the events of 2014.”
Commentary |
on Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, poems by Nicky Beer
“Beer is fascinated by the question of provenance and the genuine. What is an original, anyway? What makes it so, and why is that more real than the replica of itself?”
Commentary |
on Woman Running in the Mountains, a novel by Yūko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt
“There is something perpetually probing about Tsushima’s prose, something horror-stricken — it’s as though the writing itself were constantly afraid of stumbling on some fresh new terror.”
Commentary |
on The Bar at Twilight, stories by Frederic Tuten
“These fifteen scintillating short stories reflect Tuten’s unceasing drive to hone his craft — and confirm his reputation as a master of the genre at age 86.”
Commentary |
on Flight and Metamorphosis, poems by Nelly Sachs, translated from the German by Joshua Weiner
“She trafficks in sturdy archetypal tropes and symbols—but this nomenclature never seems static or hackneyed; everything’s repurposed, continually made incantatory and strange.”
Commentary |
Two Debuts: on Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood & Other Poems & Aimee Seu’s Velvet Hounds
“Notions about individual and collective myths offer a red carpet runway into the gorgeous, temptingly nostalgic, sonically sensuous, and emotionally provocative worlds of these debuts.”
Commentary |
on Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck
“… his way of regarding Thoreau — as a silent companion, a double, a person worthy of not only appreciation but interrogation — resonates as an I-Thou encounter.”
Commentary |
on Earth Room, poems by Rachel Mannheimer
“Earth Room presents history as though it may, also, be a kind of conceptual art, which has both mortal stakes and the structure of a dark joke … Here we are, at the end of knowledge. Here we are, at the height of innovation and its catastrophic utopias …”
Commentary |
on Drive, poems by Elaine Sexton
“ ‘Drive’ can be an imperative verb and, as a noun, a synonym for passion; a gay woman comfortable in a seat often reserved for straight white men – and dangerous for those who aren’t.”
Commentary |
on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Bookmarked by Robin Black & Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life: Bookmarked by Pamela Erens
“For all the social breadth of Middlemarch, Eliot grasped interiority as well as Woolf did, just in a different mode; she knew that living in a society meant carrying aspects of the various personalities that occupy it.”
Commentary |
on Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Daniel Mark Epstein
” ‘Forget that you exist,’ she writes. Already she was fading from public view. Soon the diary entries become careful records — sometimes near hourly — of drug dosages.”