Commentary |
on The Secret Habit of Sorrow, stories by Victoria Patterson
“the virtues of looking at the world plain, with deep respect for the painful choices each of us make every day for incalculable, if often unjustifiable, reasons”
Commentary |
on Insomnia by Marina Benjamin
“In sleeplessness, I have come to understand that there is a taxonomy of darkness to uncover, and with it a nocturnal literacy we can acquire.”
Commentary |
on Human Hours, poems by Catherine Barnett
“The poems seem to assemble not so much a voice but a body … an embodied mind living awkwardly and graciously in the vulnerable body that orchestrates that mind”
Commentary |
on Frail Sister by Karen Green
“not simply a graphic narrative made up of a compelling art form — it is a song, a dirge, a mystery, and a tragic lark”
Commentary |
on Barbie Chang, poems by Victoria Chang
“Chang’s poems capture a startling intimacy paired with an uncanny distance … a mesmerizing paradox”
Commentary |
on The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies by Ben Fritz
“Today, anything that’s not a big-budget franchise film or a low-cost, ultra-low-risk comedy or horror movie is an endangered species at Hollywood’s six major studios.”
Commentary |
on Luxury, poems by Philip Schultz
“an unaffected emotional directness and that rarest of things among poets of an autobiographical bent, something very like humility”
Commentary |
on A Certain Plume by Henri Michaux, translated by Richard Sieburth
A Certain Plume finds Michaux considering his early life, its inextinguishable rootlessness, his salvational discovery of words and literature, and the mystical.
Commentary |
on Real Life: An Installation, poetry by Julie Carr
” … performative freedom: a glance at the constraints of the imagination at odds with reality in a country where freedom is not freely and justly given to all …”
Commentary |
on Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, a memoir by Grace Schulman
“Was it Marianne Moore’s example that kept Schulman from the discouragement and rage many women of her generation knew?”
Commentary |
on Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create, by Pascal Boyer
“We should not assume that human minds are designed to acquire true information about their natural and social environments,” Boyer writes of the “folk sociology” that groups tend to embrace.
Commentary |
A Conversation with Dawn Raffel
“Often when I pick up a new book of critically acclaimed literary fiction, I find that it’s beautifully written but doesn’t really offer me the ‘ticket to someplace new’ that I crave.”
Commentary |
on The Order of the Day, a historical narrative by Eric Vuillard, translated by Mark Polizzotti
“Vuillard’s dismaying miniaturism of 1937 left the Goncourt Prize judges to imagine the worst of their own moment — nationalism and racism.”
Commentary |
on The Carrying, poems by Ada Limόn
“the poems paint something of an illuminated manuscript of a life”
Commentary |
on I Didn’t Talk, a novel by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris
“The revelations of testimony,” “the narratives of witness” … during times of emergency, and emergency is ever present, we extol the virtues and necessity of these forms of expression. In I Didn’t Talk, Beatriz Bracher’s second novel and the first to be rendered in English, an educator named Gustavo recalls the decades of violence and persecution in…