Reviews
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Polar Bear in Paradise
The protagonist of T Cooper’s short novel is an ambitious, self-destructive, porn-loving, totally sympathetic… bear.
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Hammer and Landslide, an Exhilaration
Watson’s skill here, as on so many pages, is to be accessible and kinetic while seeing something new in a common experience. Her sight is so unique, her inner editor so keen, that she brings a prismatic freshness to what…
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Asunder
“Boats are lost at sea. Drowning is different. Water fills the lungs making life at first difficult, then impossible, to sustain.”
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The Way We Live Now
Two recent books by Asian American writers confront stereotypes while exploring the rich interiority of the characters’ lives.
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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.
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Walking Shadows
A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs.
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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.
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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.
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I Hotel
The National Book Award finalist explores the roots of Asian American activism and paints a vivid portrait of revolutionary San Francisco.
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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 closes around Kant: things can be both means to an…
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Player One
The latest novel from Douglas Coupland critiques contemporary culture, but lacks fresh perspectives.
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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 editor and his varied gifts unite.