Reviews
-
Living, Thinking, Looking, by Siri Hustvedt
A particular essay in Siri Hustvedt’s new collection Living, Thinking, Looking encapsulates much of what is equally intriguing and frustrating about her as an essayist. Called “Outside the Mirror,” the essay is a cogent reflection on self-consciousness and superficiality in…
-
Citizen by Aaron Shurin
Aaron Shurin writes piercingly lovely poetry that ‘s multidimensional and insists on being read aloud, though its eloquence is equally powerful on the page without sound…
-
The Secret of Evil, by Roberto Bolaño
In one of the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s new collection The Secret of Evil, the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, whose arresting and beastly Jupiter and Seleme graces the American jacket of Bolaño’s 2666, is referenced by a man “present at…
-
People Who Eat Darkness, by Richard Lloyd Parry
I saw Lucie Blackman last week. She was walking down the street in Austin, Texas near the Congress Avenue Bridge. Then I saw her a few days later in the grocery store, separating the ripe tomatoes from the hard ones.…
-
Across the Land and the Water by W. G. Sebald
In Sebald’s Across the Land and Water, the theme is clear. In these collections, we have named men and women (names) traveling, staying in hotels, unanchored, exiled and lost, seemingly forever, from their home.
-
The Agriculture Hall of Fame, by Andrew Malan Milward
In the early morning hours of August 21st, 1863, 26-year-old Captain William Quantrill led several hundred Confederate guerillas into the town of Lawrence, Kansas, a hotbed of abolitionist support, in retaliation for the looting of Osceola, Missouri two years earlier.…
-
Long Division by Alan Michael Parker
Parker’s voice is so singular and strong that I don’t question it, even when it relies on wit, and in return, Parker rewards me for following him when I least expect it.
-
The World Without You, by Joshua Henkin
The World Without You, Joshua Henkin’s new book, is that rare breed: the twenty-first century domestic novel. Henkin’s characters, the Frankels – think Salinger’s Glass family, but more pretentious – spend the plot over a three-day period (it is, importantly,…
-
The Mere Weight of Words by Carissa Halston
Most of the outrage surrounding the erosion of the English language centers on the misuse of punctuation. Lynne Truss professed the desire to carry a red marker with her everywhere so that she could correct mistakes on signs in shops.…
-
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses,” writes Brazilian novelist Clarice…
-
An Individual History by Michael Collier
Collier’s poems refuse to submit to a culture that has come to hold the individual suspect or in contempt. Many offer poignant but unsentimental family portraits made with vivid detail, with images that are remembered, hence recovered and immortalized.
-
Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s novel, Children in Reindeer Woods, opens on a summer day during wartime in an unnamed country: the sun is high in the sky. Three soldiers cross a green meadow toward a two-story farmhouse. A small group of adults…