Reviews
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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.
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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.
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Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.
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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.
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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.
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Less Is More
The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating.
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Dead Ahead
Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader.
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Serious Men
Manu Joseph’s satirizes contemporary India, “pounding away at the caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball.”
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Return Them to Their Sources Uninterpreted
Each conceit, each stanza, each line in Lovely, Raspberry sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz’s absurdism, aspects of the human condition are illumined in unique, resonant fashion.
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The Silent Woman
An account of the marriage between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller says a lot about the actress’s hygiene and sexual habits. The relationship, not so much.
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The Tiki King
“Zahlah quit the bed and saw her dark reflection in the full-length mirror. An American woman. That’s what she saw. Liberated and humiliated.”
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As If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.