A dizzying debut with something to say and a story to tell, David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts (Ecco, 2020) takes crime novel conventions and recasts them in a fresh, uniquely Native…
Book Reviews
- Photo by Moheb Soliman / From the series Tidings / A Protocol of Circulation, Washing Up & Will In the Land of 10,000 Lakes, to which I recently relocated from the land of infinite spectacles, Ca…
- César Aira / Photo by Nina Subin / Courtesy of New Directions A canonical writer of the fantastic and foundational modernista poet, the reactionary polymath Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) was…
- Nasim Marashi’s recently released novel I’ll Be Strong for You (Paeez Fasl-e Akhar-e Sal Ast), translated by Poupeh Missaghi (Astra House, 2021), is a first-person fictiona…
- Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing / Photo by Alex Berger / Flickr The year 2021 marks the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In April, the CCP released the latest edition…
- Our society is increasingly global, and the era of Covid-19 is no different. We may forget our localities and the importance of community in consuming the news and internet media. One city, the domain…
- Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer in the TV adaptation of A Discovery of Witches (2018) / IMDB Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy has taken a new life through the Sundance dramatic series,…
- Ewa Lipska / Photo by Włodzimierz Wasyluk / Culture.pl Released shortly before the death of Adam Zagajewski, Ewa Lipska’s Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021) benefi…
- Background image: typescript of “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims,” by B. C Franklin / Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from Tul…
- Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was shown as the premiere when the Forest Theatre in Gdańsk opened in 1911 / Photo by magro_kr / Flickr Anna Frajlich, who recently added to her long…
- Ghetto Heroes Square in Kraków / Photo by annaspies / Flickr Piotr Florczyk’s From the Annals of Kraków (Lynx House Press, 2020) narrates the searing realization of an almost unnoticed abs…
- Photo by Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr The Gospel According to H. L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020) is an audacious book that foregrounds translation as a means of critiquing our understanding o…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 Mediter…
- 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 history of…
- 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…
- 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-fifth an…
- 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…
- 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,…
- 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…
- 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), probably e…
- 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. A wa…
- 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 and the i…
- 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…