Reviews
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In the Wilds of Magic: Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark
Despite the challenges presented by this novel’s wandering nature, Lispector’s stylistic feats enchants through to the end, and offers a compelling perspective on the wild magic of her voice.
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The Anger of Memory: Teju Cole’s Tremor
In this, Cole has taken the “tragedy” of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel.
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Owning the Self: Yesenia Montilla’s Muse Found in a Colonized Body
I only care about revolution / & the ugly business of revenge.
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A Literature for Lost Souls: Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound
Vasyakina powerfully encompasses the absurd and expansive universe of what Gogol described as the “unbridled incomprehensible Rus,” her homeland land with its terrors, its poetry and loftiness and its magic, to the skin and bones of the tender and violent…
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The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
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Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form
THE LONG FORM reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
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The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays
Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.
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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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Of Streets and Saints: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Boys Alive and Theorem
Considered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.
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Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within 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.
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Imprisoned by Insomnia: Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq
Memoir 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.
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Giving Voice to Illness: A Comparative Review of Three Recent Cancer-themed Collections
All 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.