Commentary |
on In West Mills, a novel by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
“He may be disinterested in modernist gestures. But Winslow shows us that the old ways of being new never lose their currency.”
Commentary |
on Stay and Fight, a novel by Madeline Ffitch
“Stay and Fight isn’t an activist novel in which the heroic environmentalists beat back the encroaching developers. The landscape is too complicated for that now. But Ffitch also envisions a more compassionate world where people can improve the institutions that are holding fast to an environment-wrecking sensibility.”
Commentary |
on Crosslight For Youngbird by Asiya Wadud
” … an exercise in radical empathy that demands we recognize poetry not just as an expression of truth, but of our common humanity and inhumanity …”
Commentary |
on Beirut Hellfire Society, a novel by Rawi Hage
“As the novel opens, a son is inducted by his father into the Hellfire Society, a clandestine group that arranges the disposition of dead people who have been denied conventional burial.”
Commentary |
on Beyond Babylon, a novel by Igiaba Scego, translated from the Italian by Aaron Robertson
“… a testament to the psychological dissonance that refugees suffer as they remake lives in foreign places while under the pervasive shadow of brutal pasts.”
Commentary |
on Black Is The Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, by Emily Bernard
“Bernard suggests black joy is always complicated, marred by the possibility of external (and internal) surveillance and the specter of sudden violence.”
Commentary |
Dreaming in Exile: on Springtime In A Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti & China Dream by Ma Jian
“Ma Jian’s work is banned in China, where it is forbidden to speak or print his name … Mario Benedetti lived in exile from Uruguay in a period of dictatorship following the coup of 1973 …”
Commentary |
Brian Dillon’s Epergne: on Essayism
“Shot through Essayism is a tension between part and whole, fragment and assemblage, atomization and coherence. How to describe a sentence written on the edge of a knife? How to write one?”
Commentary |
on Some Beheadings by Aditi Machado & Fort Not by Emily Skillings
“These poets remix aspects of an aesthetic category that is often associated with John Ashbery — that of the interesting.”
Commentary |
on Hold Fast Your Crown, a novel by Yannick Haenel
The novel is ‘about’ many things — madness, art, alcohol, and creativity — but it’s the delivery, the voyage, that counts here …”
Commentary |
on Among The Lost, a novel by Emiliano Monge, translated by Frank Wynne
“The book thrives on Monge’s determination to break apart the familiarity — and shake readers out — of a migrant narrative largely shaped by politics and statistics.”
Commentary |
on Against Translation by Alan Shapiro
“His fidelity to feelings and insights that cannot be reconciled with each other, his paradoxical equanimity that allows for anger and forgiving anguish, have grown more extensive …”
Commentary |
on Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories by Maxim Osipov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming and Anne Marie Jackson
“In Osipov’s stories, it is not only acts of brutality that are unpredictable. Compassion and understanding are also to be found in unexpected places.”
Commentary |
on Aug 9–Fog by Kathryn Scanlon
“Comprising fragments of a woman’s life that another woman constructed into a literary work, the book’s contrivance makes it no less ‘authentic’ …”