Commentary |
on NOT NOW NOW, poems by Sandra Doller
“Doller defies a one-note reading experience through its adaptive lyric, its ironic quips, its exuberant study of micro and macro realms.”
Commentary |
on Cadence of Vanishing, a memoir by Alice Jones
“This is both the project of Jones’ memoir and the work of the analyst: to summon language for our fear of loss, to allow it to clarify the present. This difficult labor — and its effect on its practitioners — is often hidden from public view.”
Commentary |
on A Silent Treatment, a memoir by Jeannie Vanasco
“The book chronicles a period of prolonged silence inflicted on the author by her mother, Barbara, who may sever communication at any perceived slight.”
Commentary |
on On Morrison by Namwali Serpell
“Serpell cites the critic Elaine Scarry’s argument that reading is a manual of ‘procedures for reproducing the deep structure of perception’; she affirms Morrison’s body of work as a profound philosophical investigation.”
Commentary |
on Baby Driver, an autofictional novel by Jan Kerouac
“Her father seems a ‘naughty bummish fellow’ when she first meets him; his fifty-two dollar support checks (the legally mandated minimum) are ‘autographed by the famous wino himself.'”
Commentary |
on When All the Men Wore Hats, a memoir by Susan Cheever
“The more the book goes off track, the more entertaining it is, and the more likely it is to veer into profundity, into fondness, into insight.”
Commentary |
on Happy Bad, a novel by Delaney Nolan
“Happy Bad is a fascinating for the way that it feels thoroughly contemporary while also grappling with countless Big Ideas. It’s sneaky like that.”
Commentary |
on The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell
“Bell makes a broader argument: the American Revolution marked an inflection in global history, not just the West, as governments moved from absolute monarchies to an array of democratic forms.”
Commentary |
on A Fictional Inquiry, a novel by Daniele Del Guidice, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
“The narrator clearly states his purpose: ‘What I am interested in is a point at which knowing how to be and knowing how to write perhaps intersect.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Make It Broken by Patrick Pritchett, Art Is by Makoto Fujimura, The Name on the Wall by Hervé Le Tellier & Another Bone-Swapping Event by Brad Fox
“Pritchett allows us to hear what emerged when these poets rejected ‘transcendent summations’ in favor of ‘radical discontinuity.'”
Commentary |
on The Pelican Child, stories by Joy Williams
“Williams has the daring and the vision to venture farther into the cloud of unknowing than most, certainly farther than fiction writers tend to go, especially Americans.”
Commentary |
on Atom and Void, poetry by Aaron Fagan
“Lyrically ironic, Fagan’s oeuvre is intended as “a protest aimed / At the librarians of the present and the future” — which makes him sound like a performance artist rather than a mild-mannered formalist.”
Commentary |
on Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays by Clifford Thompson
“Thompson has navigated the world through his avidity for what he cherishes — music, movies, books, but also art, with an emphasis on comics.”
Commentary |
on Beyond the Cordons: Selected Poems by Gábor Schein, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mullet & Erika Mihálycsa
“Schein is a poet for whom the political, the architectural, and the personal cannot be distinguished, but instead co-create each other.”
Commentary |
on Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography by Hester Kaplan
“Her father’s ‘leavings’ — his precipitous departures into his study — felt like ‘a thousand abandonments.’ The people who really mattered to Justin Kaplan weren’t his children but the shadowy subjects of his biographical works.”