Book Reviews
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July 15, 2021 |
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 (1874–193... -
June 22, 2021 |
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... -
June 17, 2021 |
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 e... -
June 9, 2021 |
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... -
May 27, 2021 |
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 se... -
May 26, 2021 |
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)... -
May 24, 2021 |
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... -
May 11, 2021 |
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 he... -
April 28, 2021 |
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 unnoti... -
February 3, 2021 |
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 understa... -
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...
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