Commentary |
on No Judgment, essays by Lauren Oyler
“Does Oyler know that her negative reviews have had an impact? Sure. Does she care? She doesn’t … not care, but observes that caring too much about it is playing a different game than what the critic does.”
Commentary |
on The Upstate, poems by Lindsay Turner
“The poems generate a sense of depletion. They also come across as casually and glancingly violent (roadkill and dogfights), generic (strip malls and parking lots), and contaminated (haze and smog).”
Commentary |
on The Other Profile, a novel by Irene Graziosi, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand
“Graziosi senses that recovering our humanity, preserving it, keeping it away from the marketplace, can move us to desperate behavior.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: on Wings of Red, a novel by James W. Jennings, February 1933, nonfiction by Uwe Wittstock & The Rainbow, a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
“Jennings understands that the artifice of autofiction works to create the illusion that there is no artifice. It’s the artful illusion of truthfulness, rigged up from that oldest of tricks, the mixing of the recalled and the invented.”
Commentary |
on How To Draw a Novel, essays and drawings by Martín Solares
“Solares uses the how-to as an occasion for thinking about form and beauty — and, most movingly, for reflections not on the novel but on what the novel does to us.”
Commentary |
on The Body of the Soul, stories by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
“Ulitskaya not only resists the totalitarian regime, but also certain cultural and literary gender clichés. These stories mainly feature female protagonists, many of whom do not conform to traditional gender expectations.”
Commentary |
on Postcards from the Underworld, poetry by Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by the poet
“… sequences that offer subtle, intuitive glimpses into the psyche, where the interior dramas caused by human experiences of traumas and coercions take on lives of their own.”
Commentary |
on Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin
Perlin: “At the very moment when languages are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door.”
Commentary |
on Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague by Christopher Neve
“Neve here finds his own ‘late style,’ an equivalent in words for the transformations he identified in Constable, Titian, Soutine and John.”
Commentary |
on A Volga Tale, a novel by Guzel Yakhina, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon
“Steeped in the human history of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Soviet regime, Yakhina’s A Volga Tale matches the power and majesty of that great river.”
Commentary |
on Chevengur, a novel by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
“… a philosophical novel probing the deepest questions on Russia’s October revolution and the communist society that would follow it.”
Commentary |
on Craft: A Memoir by Tony Trigilio
“Developing one’s craft and then presuming to share the results is what he calls ‘an honorable form of audacity,’ based on the belief that you have done well and have something to share.”
Commentary |
Book Notes: New Music Titles — Brad Mehldau, Sly & the Family Stone, Ella Fitzgerald, and Rock & Roll in JFK’s America
“Mehldau discovered that the disruptive artist is an archetype, and each of its incarnations brings both an innovative maker and a repetition of a strange gesture.”
Commentary |
on Was It for This, poems by Hannah Sullivan
“The trouble isn’t lack of variety but a certain density of purpose, stretching readers’ attention on little to no stakes; not so much idée fixe as fixation itself, an emotional treadmill …”
Commentary |
on Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Robert Morgan
“Morgan establishes that even with Poe’s odd proclivities, life-threating addictions, and precarious and incessant need to be loved, he will always be ‘one of the most deeply moral writers in our canon.'”