New York. PEN America. 2022 (©2021). 417 pages.
IN KEN BURNS’S 2001 DOCUMENTARY series Jazz, saxophonist Branford Marsalis says, “The blues are about freedom. You know,…
MISCELLANEOUS
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2023. 289 pages. SINCE THIS REVIEW is written by an essayist, rather than a literary critic or theorist, I should perhaps begin by sharing the…
Madeira Park, British Columbia. Douglas & McIntyre. 2022. 184 pages. COMBINING PERSONAL MEMOIR with cultural history, Kinauvit? reflects Norma Dunning’s experience const…
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 268 pages. AFRICAN LITERATURES as World Literature is in the Literatures as World Literature series, described as “a novel appr…
New York. PEN America. 2022 (©2021). 417 pages. IN KEN BURNS’S 2001 DOCUMENTARY series Jazz, saxophonist Branford Marsalis says, “The blues are about freedom. You know,…
Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2022. 184 pages. IT IS MY SEMI-PROFESSIONAL opinion that anybody reviewing a book of essays must wrestle with the question, “Who on earth bu…
New York. Scribner. 2022. 208 pages. FEN, BOG AND SWAMP, by Annie Proulx, is the much-anticipated follow-up to her last work, Barkskins, where Proulx, well known fo…
Toronto. House of Anansi. 2022. 200 pages. WRITERS AND THINKERS have presented Canada’s Massey Lectures since 1961, published to accompany CBC broadcasts; Tomson Highway delive…
New York. Amistad. 2022. 368 pages. SHORTLY AFTER THE publication of Miss Chloe, a graduate student sent me an unsolicited text message exclaiming, “So far I am 2…
New York. Other Press. 2023. 432 pages. PUBLISHED IN FRANCE in 1999, Nicolas Delalande’s Struggle and Mutual Aid is a mainly Eurocentric study of the International Workingme…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2022. 430 pages. IN THE FIRST two frames of Ducks, Kate Beaton introduces herself as the protagonist of this very personal and profoun…
Oxfordshire, UK. Routledge. 2022. 238 pages. USING AN APPROACH that empowers students by fostering their hidden constructions of mathematics structures, The Psychology of Mathema…
London. Chelsea Green. 2022. 214 pages. MATTIAS DESMET IS professor of psychology at the University of Ghent (Belgium). He is well known in academic circles for his research on fraud…
Urbana. University of Illinois Press. 2021. 316 pages. DURING ROUGHLY THE first half of the twentieth century, the literature of the fantastic in English was subdivided into well-del…
Evanston. Northwestern University Press. 2022. 134 pages. FROM BOETHIUS’S The Consolation of Philosophy to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, the history o…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2022. 320 pages. THROUGHOUT HIS outstanding career as a fiction writer, Mario Vargas Llosa has also distinguished himself as a notable literary critic. His books o…
New York. Austin Macauley. 2021. 331 pages. I REREAD Domnica Radulescu’s memoir, Dream in a Suitcase, after I returned from a weekend trip to Slovakia. There, in a trai…
Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2022. 234 pages. THIS VISUALLY STUNNING collection of photographs and essays presents readers with an unsettling view of the moment in tim…
Seattle. Sublunary Editions. 2022. 124 pages. AS A NOVELIST, Pierre Senges is generally published by Verticales, one of the two mainstream purveyors of experimental French writing. S…
New York. Pantheon. 2022. 512 pages. CIVIL RIGHTS QUEEN begins with a provocative poem, written by a fifteen-year-old Constance Juanita Baker, that questions the injustice s…
White River Junction, Vermont. Chelsea Green. 2022. 208 pages. THE MUSKY BREATH of the Polish bison bulls, cloudy in the cool green thicket of the deciduous understory, is a dif…
Chicago. Haymarket Books. 2022. 328 pages. EDITED BY CAITS MEISSNER, current director of the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program, The Sentences That Create Us is…
New York. New Press. 2022. 352 pages. THE TEXTILE MILLS in England were key to the development of the Industrial Revolution. Commonly left out of the picture was the crucial com…
Princeton. Princeton University Press. 2022. 208 pages. JHUMPA LAHIRI’S CAREER as a writer has defied conventional expectations. Having achieved critical acclaim as a South Asian Ame…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 335 pages.MANY PEOPLE HAVE written about mental crises—one thinks of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Stevenson, Waugh, Plath, and Styron, for instance—bu…