Commentary |
on The Guardian of Amsterdam Street, a novel by Sergio Schmucler, translated from the Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer
“Despite its small-scale setting, Schmucler touches broad themes: religion and the power and abuses of the Catholic Church, revolution and repatriation, and the responsibility we have to our ancestors, to remember but also to move on.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” / Part IV
In the final of four installments of this annual feature, we comment on poetry collections by Allison Joseph, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Veronica Golos.
Commentary |
on Meeting in Positano, a novel by Goliarda Sapienza, translated by Brian Robert Moore
“Sapienza ’s mother signed her up for theater classes in Rome when she was 16. After this early training, she worked with Visconti, Pasolini, and Maselli. Her cinematic orientation is evident in her new novel …”
Commentary |
on Names For Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
“The concept of ‘place’ remains opaque for her. She is inextricably caught up in the turbulent stories of her family’s past and has grown weary of answering Americans’ questions about her ethnicity and skin color.”
Commentary |
on Gallery of Clouds, hybrid nonfiction by Rachel Eisendrath
“Fiction ‘never lieth,’ Sidney wrote, because it never presumed to tell the truth. Yet we crave the fiction that fiction promises. If we can’t wholly inhabit fiction, Eisendrath asks, how do we live with it?”
Commentary |
on In Concrete, a novel by Anne F. Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
“… a riot of wordplay and puns and grammatical tricks … The translator writes in a note that the work was ‘like trying to catch an eel in one pond and put it in another.'”
Commentary |
on A Man Ain’t Nothin’, poetry by Jason McCall
“In rejecting the attempt to make a hero of a man who was worked to death, the poet raises larger questions about the Protestant work ethic and the ever-chugging engines of capitalist meritocracy …”
Commentary |
on Big Bad, stories by Whitney Collins
“By reaching past realism to a place of imaginative relief, whether invented by the characters or inhabited by them, Collins illuminates the capacities and limits of our natures.”
Commentary |
on See/Saw: Looking at Photographs by Geoff Dyer
“At the heart of Dyer’s fascination with photographs exists this friction between his desire to make up stories about them and their unresponsive stillness.”
Commentary |
on The Selected Letters of John Berryman, edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
“A lively, expansive portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, difficult, and deeply troubled man, along with a wealth of information for anyone interested in this polarizing poet’s life and work … and a revealing window onto the dynamics of the mid-20th century literary world.”
Commentary |
on Popisho, a novel by Leone Ross
“… a maximalist instinct to create a world that’s weird, funny, erotic — and just enough like ours to say something about it.”
Commentary |
“Poets Recommend” — Part III
In the third of four installments of this annual feature, we comment on collections by Hoa Nguyen, Elizabeth Powell, and Dorsey Craft
Commentary |
on A Perfect Cemetery, stories by Federico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft
“When Un cementerio perfecto was published in Argentina in 2016, Falco told an interviewer that he, too, feels close ties to the environment, a trait acquired partly from his grandparents who were campesinos.”
Commentary |
on Lolita in the Afterlife, edited by Jenny Minton Quigley & Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense by Robert Alter
“It is the writer’s obligation to create an ‘illusion of the largeness of life.’ Which may account for the longevity of Nabokov’s ‘timebomb.’ Lolita will continue to be explosive.”
Commentary |
on The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland by Andrew Kornbluth
“The stories are horrific, yet the twisted rationales and bland denials of accused killers, who usually walked away from court with impunity, are equally chilling.”