Reviews
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These Veins of Leaf, Hand, Storm and Stream
Ideally, critics and teachers are humbled by their vocations and the artistry the vocations expose them to, encouraging effort to stay fresh , emotionally resonant and intellectually worthwhile. Say yes to all of the above when the subject is Di…
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Somewhere Below the Solar Plexus of Her
What does it take for a person to kill a living thing, then a human being? Why are the truths of war silenced?
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Toteninsel in English
New in English, Gerhard Meier’s 1979 Isle of the Dead recalls W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as two friends traverse their town, discussing nature and death in elegant prose.
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Books as Fetish Objects
Unpacking My Library introduces a new sub-genre to coffee table books: library porn.
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What Part Are You Now?
Harrison’s style is spare and evocative, more expressive than Hemingway but less misogynistic, more accessible than Thoreau. Honest.
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Against an Ethical Machine
Rejected by the early Soviet state, Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky published only nine stories in his lifetime; luckily his novel The Letter Killers Club is now available in English.
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It’s Pigsty I
Nomura plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza.
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Light
New in English, Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel Dukla is more of a verbal painting than a novel, but his exquisite descriptions are worth the reader’s work.
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Death of an Author
Edouard Levé’s Suicide, a slim, declarative, idea-driven novel, is daring and raw, and packed full of rewards for any reader willing to take a wide step outside of the American mainstream.
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O Circular Philosopher
The field is integral, too, to Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice—the field of vision, field of the empty page and of the populated page, field of self/ body/maker, absence of field. It is from these fields that Beachy-Quick enters into a…
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Grossman’s Magnum Opus
In his latest novel, To the End of the Land, Israeli novelist David Grossman encapsulates the magical thinking of a country that could easily not exist.