Reviews
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Broad As the Mouth of the Hudson
In Jeff Sharlet’s latest book about religion in America, Sweet Heaven When I Die, “religion” is something protean and heterodox.
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Envy Never Sleeps
As if to heed Hecate’s rebuke, to show the dire glory of her art, Szporluk’s poems speak with a voice unhinged by an unyielding despair. Teeming with submerged violence and opaque anger, they swirl, futile, in the face of our…
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Anxiety Bombs
In her debut novel, Threats, Amelia Gray is coy about plot in deference to the beauty and urgency of people’s thoughts.
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Plenty Worth Saying, With Very Few Words
Kevin Moffett’s Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is one of the most delightful collections in recent memory.
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Met a Lunatic on Craigslist
But even here, vertigo and ambivalence dominate, and I find myself searching the poems for the kinetic energy of a walker in the city; heel marks and muddy droplets. I want to overhear conversations on the streets.
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Modern Retellings
The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Death Comes to Pemberly both attempt to pay homage to nineteenth century novelists, but the translation is not always apt.
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If I Squint, I See Them Clearly
With its host of defunct genomes, a rupturing cosmos, malevolent gods, a derelict body politic, and endless war, the poems in this collection act as harbingers of the wasteland America may soon become.
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The Map and the Territory
The latest novel from infant terrible Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory sits in his oeuvre as a less-cruel, poignant romp through familiar themes.
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The Vanishers
Heidi Julavits’ latest novel The Vanishers is provocative and full of hefty, even academic ideas—at its best, a nouveau feminist manifesto.
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The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry
It is clear from Dove’s introduction to the anthology, and from her selections, that she just wanted an engaging, informative, high -quality collection. She succeeded.
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An Inverted World of Trees and Trembling Sky
At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.
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What We Become
Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.