In Defense of Translation
Professor and translator, David Bellos celebrates the enlightening task of translation in his new book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.
Reviews
2621 posts
Did You Hear about Bradley?
Hal Niedzviecki’s new collection, Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, asks us what is essential to narrative.
Man, Wall, Sea
Working with his father, Joshua Edwards has also created an intriguingly masculine book. The collection presents father and son’s perspectives on an American landscape molded and scarred by men.
From Helplessness to Competence
Lily Tuck’s engaging new novel I Married You For Happiness explores a 40-year-plus marriage from the vantage of one night.
The Slow Urgency of Drowning
Stacie Leatherman weaves lush metaphors and imagery that drifts and flakes, and is riddled with earthly abundance, colors, and dust. Her writing is sensory, and her voice and syntax trick…
Debutantes in Distress
Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives.
Irreconcilable Differences
Gary Lutz’s new collection, divorcer, tells seven stories of divorce that will captivate every reader―single, married or divorced.
The Night is a God’s Wound
This [collection] is a rare effort to “open the window” for western readers onto the last fifty years of Chinese poetics.
God Bless Steve Almond
In Steve Almond’s new story collection, God Bless America, Almond does what he does best—eviscerate and then forgive our pitiful culture of excess.
The Force That Drives All Flesh
Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a case study for how to observe, recall and (possibly) create from whole cloth with clarity that never becomes brittle.
The Middle
In Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection of short stories, Before the End, After the Beginning, we see people in transitional phases―neither flying nor drowing, but floating.
The Winner Returns
A 1972 novel recently re-released, Rosalyn Drexler’s To Smithereens plays with fact and imagination, memoir and fiction, in ways seldom seen in her own era.