Commentary |
on Mina’s Matchbox, a novel by Yoko Ozawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
“Ogawa beautifully captures the intricate emotions of a child who desperately wants to belong. And how relatively short intervals of our childhood can take on an outsized significance.z’
Commentary |
on Go Figure, poems by Rae Armantrout
“The poet’s latest collection is rich with allusions to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and other man-made dangers. Such themes pair well with Armantrout’s iconic version of Language poetry and her interest in quantum physics.”
Commentary |
on What I Know About You, a novel by Éric Chacour, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss
“From the bustling streets of Cairo to the quiet solitude of Montreal, this novel is a sweeping saga of family secrets, cultural clashes, and the sacrifices made in the name of love.”
Commentary |
on Life After Kafka, a novel by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker
“The couple’s relationship was mostly an epistolatory one – except for a brief vacation together in the spa town of Marienbad – and is buoyed by the 600 letters and postcards that Kafka wrote to Felice.”
Commentary |
on Ice, poems by David Keplinger
“An homage to fragmented forms of ancients solidified in ice and lost to the living world, a requiem. At the same time, the poetry retains the elegiac dimensions of his personal losses.”
Commentary |
on Question 7, a novel by Richard Flanagan
“Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.”
Commentary |
on The Material, a novel by Camille Bordas
“Her surprising premise fuses, and neutralizes, two hack expectations: that MFA students tend not to be great at taking jokes, and that comedians tend not to be great at taking criticism.”
Commentary |
on Van Gogh and the End of Nature by Michael Lobel
“There’s a dialectic between planting scenes in Arles, emblematized by figures of plowmen and a Sower, and smoke-capped townscapes in the background, teeming with chimneys …”
Commentary |
on The Caricaturist, a novel by Norman Lock
“The events of The Caricaturist are framed by the jingoism that attended the United States’ imperial ambitions generally and the Spanish-American War in particular.”
Commentary |
on Proverbs of Limbo, poems by Robert Pinsky
“Pinsky is our great poet of ambivalence, who asks: how can an artist participate in a culture so hostile to that artist’s existence? And yet, to be dispossessed is to lay claim to all.”
Commentary |
on poetry by Eugenio Montale: Late Montale, translated by George Bradley, and Butterfly of Dinard, translated by Oonagh Stransky & Marla Moffa
“The later poems reveal ‘the essential features of the aged poet’s cast of mind: his sardonic self-deprecation; his skepticism regarding grand theories … his Shakespearean conviction that life is a theatrical performance of, at best, indeterminate import.'”
Commentary |
Book Notes — Fiction: on The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada & Swimming in Paris by Colombe Schneck
“By luring us into the severities of this character’s psyche, Zaher simply dispenses with our feel-good ethics, not because those ethics are bad but because they are weak.”
Commentary |
on The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo
“an extended inquiry into how a wide range of artists have managed to sustain their vision — how they’ve kept their other eyes open throughout the length of their artistic careers.”
Commentary |
on Here After, a memoir by Amy Lin
“She is no longer able to sleep, work as a teacher, laugh genuinely, attend to others, or imagine any kind of viable future. She quickly discovers that people are terrified of her suffering — even when she attempts to demonstrate what she calls ‘Good Signs’.”
Commentary |
on Canandaigua, poems by Donald Revell
“The compelling combination of familiarity and deep mystery stems from the varied ways Revell discovers to bring these essential concerns into continually awakening conversations with one another.”