Reviews
-
Triumph and Oblivion
José Saramago’s posthumous novel The Elephant’s Journey is an exploration of the self—and a gift to his readers.
-
Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It instead feels rather gleeful.
-
It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort…
-
Between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era.
-
Renewed, Transfigured
Like boxes in storage, Andrea Scrima’s memories are itinerant. Wherever she resides, nothing seems to be in the right place.
-
The Range of Your Amazing Nothing
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis…
-
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
-
Am I a Redundant Human Being?
A lost literary voice from early 1900s Austria slyly addresses female self-loathing and finds answers with unsettling modern relevance.
-
Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.
-
Welcome to the Occupation
A short novel by Michael Knight sees the post-WWII occupation of Japan through the eyes of a confused typist in General MacArthur’s office.
-
Nothing Can Outlast Its Loss
[Nick Laird’s] steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes.
-
Less Is More
The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating.