Book Reviews
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January 11, 2021 |
If Serbian poet and novelist Zvonko Karanović were a painter, he would be a surrealist. In the forty-one dark prose poems of Sleepwalkers on a Picnic, in English and Serbian parallel texts t... -
December 16, 2020 |
Margarita Liberaki Three Summers Trans. Karen Van Dyck NYRB Three Summers begins with a mystery. Katerina’s absent grandmother is an enigma to her family. Katerina fixates on this... -
December 7, 2020 |
Sonia Nimr / Source: TAMER Institute for Community Education This whirlwind adventure begins with protagonist Qamar’s birth and follows her life along the titular wondrous journeys around the... -
October 27, 2020 |
Mikhal Dekel / Photo by Nina Subin Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (Norton, 2019), Mikhal Dekel’s outstanding book, is many things: a memoir, a family genealogy, a hist... -
October 14, 2020 |
Helene Tursten An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good Soho Crime Trans. Marlaine Delargy I first picked up Swedish writer Helene Tursten’s collection of stories for its title and for its length; I... -
October 6, 2020 |
Lesley M.M. Blume / Photo © Oberto Gili / Courtesy of HMH Books “The opportunity to learn from history’s tragedies has not yet passed.”—Lesley Blume Released on the seventy-f... -
September 17, 2020 |
Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection of flash, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations (Okay Donkey Press, 2020), is a journey through desire’s relationship with the body: the exhaustion af... -
August 17, 2020 |
The tagline (or, in some cases, subtitle) of David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire reads simply: “A woman in trouble.” Of course, if you’ve seen that movie, it’s about a lot more than that,... -
July 29, 2020 |
What defines a moment, a movement? The cause or the people who defend it? Too often both are overshadowed by chaos, destruction, and misdirection. John Willis’s Mni Wiconi / Water Is Lif... -
July 2, 2020 |
Photo by Ben Hershey / Unsplash John Feinstein, when he wrote The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season (Doubleday, 2020), pro... -
June 30, 2020 |
Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice... -
June 22, 2020 |
Yu Miri / Courtesy of Zoom Japan Yu Miri first started researching the evictions of the homeless community in Tokyo’s Ueno Park back in 2006. Days or even hours before visits by the emperor an... -
June 3, 2020 |
Naoise Dolan probably wishes her debut novel, Exciting Times (Ecco, 2020), wasn’t so relevant. Although the book isn’t set during a global pandemic, it does include the many unsavory aspects... -
May 6, 2020 |
Neva Lukić / Courtesy of Cultural Institution Blesok The recent collection of short stories by Neva Lukić, Endless Endings (Bokeh, 2018), originally written in Croatian and translated... -
April 23, 2020 |
Left: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in Normal People (2020) / Courtesy of IMDB Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel is a meticulous observation, or even a study, of how one human being c... -
April 21, 2020 |
The author at the Zakir Hussain Delhi College during the Bengali Literary Festival 2018 / Photo courtesy of bitanchakraborty.com Simplicity and quiet elegance never fail to impress us. The eff... -
April 9, 2020 |
Mildred D. Taylor at the University of Oklahoma, October 24, 2003 / Photo by Robert Taylor Generations of American schoolchildren have grown up with Cassie Logan and her brothers, Stacey, Chri... -
March 10, 2020 |
The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die (John Murray, 2019), by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, translated from the original Bangla by Arunava Sinha, is a fast-paced thriller about the rescue mission around the... -
March 5, 2020 |
Lafcadio Hearn in 1889 / Photo by Frederick Gutekunst Born in Greece in the mid-nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn shuffled between Ireland, the West Indies, and a few cities in America before... -
February 11, 2020 |
The introductory notes to Quesadilla and Other Adventures (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, lay the ground plan for the anthology. “Food is history,” writes Ganguly.... -
February 3, 2020 |
On the cover of his latest book of prose poems, Suturas do Amor (Editorial Autor, 2019), Mozambican author Rudêncio Morais announces that he is a poeta falso or “false poet... -
January 30, 2020 |
India’s Paul Zacharia, after five decades perfecting the art of the short story in the Malayalam language, spoken in the state of Kerala, has published his first novel, A Secret History of Compas... -
January 27, 2020 |
Jurij Koch / Courtesy of Domowina-Verlag In the 1950s, a girl whom Jurij Koch knew in high school moved away from their hometown of Cottbus in East Germany. It was a case, he says in his recen... -
January 22, 2020 |
Photo by Michael Gaida / Pixabay “Health is whatever works and for as long.” This phrase, a quote from a poem by Dr. John Stone (poet-cardiologist), was announced to our literature and medicin... -
January 16, 2020 |
How is Judith Summerfield’s account of the stories she heard from her father meaningful to us, since we each have a story to tell about our own life? In the twelve chapters of A Man Comes from Som...
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After 140 days at home, one person wants more space; the other, more plants.
I wanted a room of...
If Serbian poet and novelist Zvonko Karanović were a painter, he would be a surrealist. In the forty-one dark prose poems of Sleepwalkers on a...
Barbara Epler started working at New Directions after graduating from college in 1984, and she has been its president and...
Photo by Matt Artz / Unsplash
I write with words that have shadow but don’t shelter
no sooner do I start this page insomnia burns it
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Photo by George Kourounis / Unsplash
[I ask everybody]
I ask everybody
have you noticed today
when the time passed
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