Commentary |
on In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
“Pairing the dead with the living, In Memory of Memory traces a conspicuous matrilineal line, starting with the narrator’s great-grandmother Sarra Ginzburg, ‘a tribe of strong, individual women standing like milestones spanning the century … a staircase leading steadily toward me, consisting entirely of women.’”
Commentary |
on Piñata Theory, poems by Alan Chazaro & An Incomplete List of Names, poems by Michael Torres
“The new generation of Chicano poets is negotiating themes such as identity and masculinity but through a millennial lens — fully aware of the challenges in their communities, but whose consciousness has been shaped by the previous generation’s successes and shortcomings.”
Commentary |
on The Earliest Witnesses, poems by G.C. Waldrep
“Waldrep does not let the sorrows and pain that both attend and define this book — the sicknesses, the surgeries, the omnipresence of war, the loneliness of the ‘tourist’ — have the final say … The Earliest Witnesses chooses clarity — which, in this case, means faith.”
Commentary |
on Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, a novel by Joseph Andras, translated from the French by Simon Leser
“… a compact narrative with an elevated pulse and singular purpose – to show how an unexceptional person may act exceptionally when oppression is too threatening to one’s community to ignore.”
Commentary |
Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life With the Internet by Maël Renouard, translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty
“We’ve been conditioned to expect one of two narratives in books about the internet, and Renouard has written neither of them. He is not a pop-futurist nor a scold or a pessimist … His third way reframes the internet as making tweaks to our emotions that are subtler than political rage and FOMO …”
Commentary |
on Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses
“He makes clear that it is ‘effectively a kind of colonization to assume that we all write for the same audience or that we should do so if we want our fiction to sell.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Mahagony and Sun of Consciousness by Édouard Glissant, Yours Presently, Selected Letters of John Wieners & Allegria, poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti
Glissant: “To be born to the world is an exhausting splendor. And for whomever wishes to guard the testimony of this birth, there is a time of chaotic opening, of anarchic presentiment of history, of furious masticating of words, of vertiginous seizure of clarities …”
Commentary |
on The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, nonfiction by Sonia Faleiro
“… not only a true crime story, fine journalism about the condition of low-caste women in rural India, and an important feminist work, but also the complicated story of a village as an ecosystem.”
Commentary |
on Crushing It, poems by Jennifer L. Knox
“If postwar American lyric poetry and stand-up share an affinity for abjection, Knox’s poetry performs this embarrassment of the abject in a spectacular way, while grounding her performance in the particulars of what one might be embarrassed about.”
Commentary |
on Sybille Bedford: A Life by Selina Hastings
“A deft skill with summary narrative, tracing her subject’s peregrinations and her many rides on the ‘sexual carousel’ of upper-class European lesbianism. But the real joy is Hastings’ capability to center the reason her subject is notable at all — her writing — and to describe how she wrote.”
Commentary |
on Tonight Is Already Tomorrow, a novel by Lia Levi, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford
“Critics often note the author’s simple colloquial style but it is deceptively ensnaring. She intuitively understands the dangers of Jewish oblivion; she endured it as a little girl, and it has permanently marked her as an adult.”
Commentary |
on Zorrie, a novel by Laird Hunt
“The meditative, eerie, and beautiful Zorrie is a journey story — but Hunt tinkers with our expectations, turning it from an adventure tale into an elliptical, more questioning book about why we move in the first place.”
Commentary |
on Come-Hither Honeycomb, poems by Erin Belieu
“Captor and hostage. Debtor and creditor. Logical ironies, sarcasm, playful musings, while difficult sometimes to track, ultimately elucidate the difficulty of self-interrogation and reflection.”
Commentary |
on Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution by George Prochnik
“He said, ‘A new era, a new principle’ was emerging that required aesthetics to be fully engaged with ‘the movement of the time.’ Sound familiar?”
Commentary |
on Live; live; live, a novel by Jonathan Buckley
“Buckley’s protagonists are typically dry functionaries, their lives proceeding along the grooves of an implicit procedurality — urgency is muted, no sense of time dilating or contracting in the midst of emergency.”