The Way We Live Now
Two recent books by Asian American writers confront stereotypes while exploring the rich interiority of the characters’ lives.
Reviews
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Get Off Your Ass and Blow Shit Up
The Avian Gospels is a strange, compelling parable about an authoritarian city-state, an underground resistance, and a plague of mysterious birds.
Walking Shadows
A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs.
I Know My Brother In the Mirror
Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way.
Tales of Woe
Tales of Woe descends from one circle of hell to the next, an act of sabotage against the Hollywood narrative of sin, suffering, and redemption.
Things That Work Are Muffled and Mute
Through rigorous consideration, with patient generosity, Valerio Magrelli’s poetry allows all his subjects—broken machines, utterances, each of us—to be our own streets, and in such a transfixing world, a circle…
Player One
The latest novel from Douglas Coupland critiques contemporary culture, but lacks fresh perspectives.
Soften the Razor’s Edge, the Reign of Terror
Many poems, and many more lines, couplets and quatrains in Opal Sunset are superb, making their lesser companions wan imitations of what Clive James can really do when his interior…
Why They Cried
These stories by Jim Hanas are about something important: how much suffering arises in the gap between our public identities and whatever kernel of self is left inside.
The Marriage Artist
In Andrew Winer’s insightful novel, an art critic struggles with his wife’s infidelity and suicide, and a painter deals with life in Hitler’s concentration camp by creating Jewish marriage contracts.
10 Mississippi
This book is seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is… as flowing and eddying as the river of the title.