Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners
Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
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Join NOW!Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
...moreTo be a mother is to have strength, resilience, and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is also to contain the magic and power of creating a new life, of bringing up children, of making a home and a legacy.
...moreConsidered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.
...moreWithin Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
...moreMemoir is less common territory for Darrieussecq, but with insomnia, she has found a real-world subject appropriate for her ongoing concerns about making sense of the absurd.
...moreAll three poets contemplate the female body and the voice both literally and metaphorically, appealing to outside powers as they ponder how much a person can bear.
...moreThere is impressive control in the deployment of these mind spirals, with Morrison integrating link after link into a narrative that grows more complex but keeps all its many balls in the air, the kind of juggler who satisfies and surprises with what he is able to toss into the mix.
...more“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.
...moreWe’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
...moreBetween a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.
...moreBut while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting.
...moreThis humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
...moreHere, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.
...moreSontag parses out how women were—and are—patronized, idolized, romanced, and discarded based on proximity to their perceived expiration date, whereas men age without the same discrimination.
...moreMrs. S asks readers to consider the the ways characters inhabit bodies, how we inhabit our bodies.
...moreEgger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.
...moreIn this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.
...moreTo see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.
...moreThe range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
...moreHidden within all these constellations and labyrinths of philosophy is a love story and a story about the struggle of a writer to find meaning in words.
...moreMarías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
...moreMarya’s work is a slow burn; both sweet and salty, that picks up speed and ferocity as it unfolds.
...moreThe boreal forests around the town do habitually burn, and its residents were used to seeing flames over their skies in summer months.
...moreLiving entities, with whom we cannot communicate fully, seduce us in their majesty.
...more“There was no con. There was no crime. There was only fiction.”
...more. . . in a barren world with little protection and corners to hide, it’s also impossible to hide from our thoughts . . .
...moreI love it when a book forces me to reassess my thinking on a particular subject.
...more“Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clear.”
...moreIf you want to evoke the idea of who someone really is, start by showing us what they see.
...moreWe look for ourselves in literature—for comfort or for guidance—but the page rarely provides a clean mirror.
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