What Is a Person?: Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow
Safety requires setting up clear boundaries, but a restricted life is lonely and isolating and often impossible to bear.
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The Sense of Words: Reverse Engineer by Kate Colby
. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.
The Story and the Truth: Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation
. . . a scathing, satirical campus novel about academia, orientalism, the Western commodification of Asian cultures, and the lengths to which institutions will go to protect their reputations and their darlings.
The Claws That Type the Text: Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession
Rather than saying, Fuck it, and remaining stagnant in the face of cultural horrors, Monson suggests readers start with the marginalia. Exhaust all possibilities. Carve a new path where sweeping prescriptions fail to stick.
SKETCH BOOK REVIEWS: Three Faves
A roundup of great books that didn't make it into Sketch Book Reviews this year
A World Where We Are Known and Loved: Shelley Wong’s As She Appears
to be seen is not the same thing as being known
Take Your Divagations Seriously: Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer
The Last Days . . . has nothing much to do with tennis or with Roger Federer, who appears sparingly in these pages . . . [nor is it] “intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally.”
The Art of Attention: Jill Christman’s If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays
“If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself, squarely and deeply.”
When Writing about Pain is Political: In Sensorium by Tanaïs
In In Sensorium . . . Tanaïs inhabits their pain fully and seeks new ways to describe and transcend it through scent, rather than just words.
Revising Time: Nonlinear Memory in Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float
I’m getting too close to the poems, but Tierney’s collection demands a closeness.
Indiana Anomie: Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington
a portrait of the American tendency to keep the suffering of others at arm’s length as if misfortune were contagious, or to ruthlessly eliminate it entirely
The Verdant Heart of a Mythic Neighborhood: Cleyvis Natera’s Neruda on the Park
In Natera’s masterful debut novel, a simple New York City park becomes the verdant heart of a mythic neighborhood, where fire escapes are like golden staircases and the community goodwill of friends and neighbors becomes a nurturing flame that sustains its members’ hearts and souls.