Commentary |
on The Third Rainbow Girl, nonfiction by Emma Copley Eisenberg
“The entwined threads of silence, storytelling, and truth — and the messy concept of justice — are far more critical to this narrative than the murders themselves. Justice is a thing that exists within cultural norms. And those norms are often very toxic.”
Commentary |
on Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao, stories by Jonathan Tel
“The scarcity of homegrown writers allowed to portray China’s market-driven culture and suffocating state control makes Tel’s stories fundamental at this moment.”
Commentary |
on Passeggiate, poems by Judith Baumel
“Baumel’s new collection reflects on ways people, and peoples, manage to survive under time’s figured wheel. While poems often shout, ‘Look!’ Passeggiate counsels, ‘Look again.'”
Commentary |
on The Great Concert of the Night, a novel by Jonathan Buckley
“An exemplary sleight of hand – generating the strangely familiar sensation that something wonderful has been revealed, momentarily.”
Commentary |
on Place-Discipline, poems by Jose-Luis Moctezuma
“In the margins and spectrums where Moctezuma works, it is not only possible to name the wounds of colonialism, capitalism, and whiteness. It is also possible to see beyond them.”
Commentary |
on Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo by Philippe Lançon, translated from the French by Steven Rendall
“Lançon could easily have written a political polemic or an angry diatribe. Instead, he contemplates his recovery and reeducation from a lost life to a new one to be found.”
Commentary |
on The Story of a Goat, a novel by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman
“The Story of a Goat isn’t one of those novels that infantilizes its situation with animal protagonists. Murugan’s conjuring of Poonachi allows rus to examine our own malice, choices, and most intimate thoughts.”
Commentary |
Singing the Unsun: on Andrew Zawacki’s Unsun: f/11
“Even as old gestures of the pastoral must be reprised and revised, what is possible, if nothing else, is a singing of the undone.”
Commentary |
on The Hills Reply, a novel by Tarjei Vesaas, translated from the Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokkan
“Vesaas’ story rumbles with an ache for connection to people, animals and visions, and ultimately the earth, which waits to fulfill our mortal destinies.”
Commentary |
on This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte and How I Tried To Be A Good Person by Ulli Lust
“How do you draw the feeling of being unable to draw? The question is a driving force behind these graphic memoirs that reckon with disruption — jobs, needy men, motherhood”
Commentary |
on The Heart Is A Full-Wild Beast, stories by John L’Heureux
“Since the actions of faith tend to produce faith, L’Heureux insists, we must be careful where we bestow them.”
Commentary |
on Berezina: On Three Wheels from Moscow to Paris Chasing Napoleon’s Epic Fail by Sylvain Tesson, translated by Katherine Gregor
“In December 2012, Tesson went to Moscow with two French Russophiles and set off on motorcycles to recreate the itinerary of Napoleon’s catastrophic retreat from Moscow to Paris in 1812. But his obsession is the state of our humanity.”
Commentary |
on A Theory of Birds, poems by Zaina Alsous
“The story of exile is fundamentally an erotic story, about loss and longing — and therefore, the poetics of unattainability is seductive for outsiders but useless for the people living in it.”
Commentary |
on Sweet Days of Discipline, a novel by Fleur Jaeggy
“Her sentences have a blunt, stunted quality, like stone gargoyles perched above an ancient city, blank-eyed, squat and grey.”
Commentary |
on A Death In the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick
“The contemporary death of languages like Tayap is a result of commercial colonialism, which leads to an inevitable and irreversible loss of cultural continuity and diversity …”