Reviews Archives - Page 160 of 221 - The Rumpus

Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen

Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book.

The Prisoner of Heaven, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The latest novel by Spanish writer Carloz Ruiz Zafón opens on a cold winter’s day in Barcelona. Business is abysmal at Sempre & Sons bookshop. The Sempre family’s loquacious friend,…

Partyknife by Dan Magers

When James Wright said, “I have wasted my life,” Dan Magers must haven taken it to heart.

The Watery Part of the World, by Michael Parker

Michael Parker’s The Watery Part of the World opens two-hundred years ago on the shores of Nag’s Head, North Carolina, a sandbank notorious for pirates who once lured ships onto…

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, by Jose Saramago

Initially published in Portugal in 1976, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is one of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s first novels. He was fifty-four when he wrote it, and had…

Scared Text by Eric Baus

A metamorphosis occurs among the prose poems of Eric Baus’ collection, Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. We are the audience, the spectators, but also part of…

Jonah Man, by Christopher Narozny

On the surface, Christopher Narozny’s Jonah Man screams masculinity. There’s mystery, of course, and, crime, drugs, and all-too-familiar feminine archetypes. It could easily have been just another well-written book of…

Advice for Lovers by Julian Talamantez Brolaski

“A rose is arrows is eros,” as one poem has it, and who is to argue? Love and lyricism are all the better for their queerness. Brolaski, with a powerfully trans poetic, instructs us on just this fact, cloying power dynamics, pulling hair, and refusing any of the quaint old boundaries.

Inside by Alix Ohlin

At some point in Inside, Alix Ohlin’s elegant second novel, you will probably notice, as I did toward the end, that her characters have a lot of sex. I mean…

The Walk by Robert Walser

Robert Walser’s legendary novella Der Spaziergang (The Walk), the first work of his to appear in English and the only one to be translated during his lifetime, is now available…

Black Square by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

To say the least, the speaker in the collection works hard to figure himself out in relation to philosophical, religious, and spiritual matters, and while some American readers may find such a project quaint, naïve, or retro, it holds power because the speaker, no matter his tone or particular mood, remains piercingly perceptive and unabashedly honest.

The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Somewhere in an anonymous functionary’s desk drawer or a filing cabinet in a fluorescent-lit office or a cardboard box in a dusty basement sits the Persian-language manuscript of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s…

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