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on Invitation to a Bonfire, a novel by Adrienne Celt
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on The Great Believers, a novel by Rebecca Makkai
During my reading of Rebecca Makkai’s third novel The Great Believers, a feature by Corey Kilgannon ran in The New York Times titled “Shunned In Life, Forgotten in Death.” In 1985, the bodies of 17 victims of AIDS arrived for mass burial at Hart Island in Long Island Sound. Scores of stigmatized others followed to…
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on The Book by Amaranth Borsuk
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on works by Muriel Rukeyser, Francis Ponge and Pierre Voélin
The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser (West Virginia University Press) Nioque of the Early-Spring by Francis Ponge, translated by Jonathan Larson (The Song Cave) To Each Unfolding Leaf: Selected Poems, 1976-2015 by Pierre Voélin, translated by John Taylor (Bitter Oleander Press) In 1943, the F.B.I. opened a file on the 30-year old poet Muriel…
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on Sexographies, crônicas by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Lucy Greaves & Jennifer Adcock
Gabriela Wiener describes herself as “a journalist who specializes in putting herself in extreme situations and writing in the first person about those experiences.” In her essay “Planet Swingers,” she and her husband Jaime spend an evening at the “6&9 Club” in Barcelona “popular for catering to youngsters at the height of their appetites.” In…
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On RISINGTIDEFALLINGTAR: In Search of the Soul of the Sea by Philip Hoare
In the opening pages of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, Philip Hoare says that the writing of this book was triggered by his discovery of a copy of a 1968 Penguin edition of The Tempest, with an evocative woodcut cover by David Gentleman depicting a galleon lurching on high seas. It’s hard to believe he needs a prompt to…
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on Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia, essays by Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History, recipient of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, reported on the generation of Russians born in the early 1980s who told her “what it was to grow up in a country that was opening up and to come of age in a society shutting down.” Just as these…
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on Some Trick, stories by Helen DeWitt
The main character in “Brutto,” the first of 13 stories in Helen DeWitt’s new collection Some Trick, is a painter whose father had once insisted that she apprentice as a dressmaker. After three years, she proved her mastery by making a suit. Years later, when a hustling Italian art impresario named Adelberto visits her studio,…
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on The Gunners, a novel by Rebecca Kauffman
Rebecca Kauffman’s second novel, The Gunners, follows six friends as they proceed from childhood to their early thirties. “Alice, Sally, Lynn, Jimmy and Sam became Mikey’s friends when they were neighbor kids, all living on the same block, all seeking playmates as well as an escape from their own homes,” the unnamed narrator says. “The…
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on The Red Caddy: Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey by Charles Bowden
Edward Abbey (1927-1987) and Charles Bowden (1945-2014) are revered by environmentalists for their furious indictments of America’s benighted destruction of its natural resources. Both men published extensively with a focus on the deserts of the Southwest. But as far as Bowden is concerned, both of them are misunderstood by their admirers. “Environmentalism,” Bowden once said,…
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on The Emissary, a novel by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
The Japanese phrase shikata ga nai is usually translated for Anglophones as “it can’t be helped” or “nothing can be done about it.” The Stanford psychologist Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu maintains that the widespread use of this idiom indicates Japan’s abiding attitude toward disaster – a tolerance of vulnerability. It connotes the survivor’s embrace of adversity with…
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on Orphic Paris by Henri Cole
In the seventeen companionable short essays of Orphic Paris, Henri Cole casts himself in the figure of a flâneur. “The crowd is his element,” said Baudelaire about the observantly incognito boulevardier of his own era. “The lover of life makes the whole world his family.” Cole’s ambit is usually more circumscribed than – but just…
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on Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox by Bill Nowlin
On April 17, 2009, Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, the first African-American to play for the Boston Red Sox, was honored at Fenway Park in a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of his breaking the team’s color barrier. The 1959 Sox were the last of the pre-expansion teams to hire a black player. A week after Green’s…
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Nine Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Welcome to the final installment of “Poets Recommend,” The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature since 2008. Currently undergoing redesign, The Seawall will evolve into a magazine with regularly posted reviews of poetry and other genres. This season, nine poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles. Scroll down to read. The commentary includes:…
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on The Balcony, a novel by Jane Delury
The unsuspected links between far-flung lives, the reverberating after effects of decisions, the ravages of history – we are quite familiar with the notions of novels that transport us through multiple eras and locations. The novelist corrals the anxiety of time and the puzzlement of human affairs and tames them into docile understanding. Our service…