Sketch Book Reviews: What An Owl Knows
When things in the world feel particularly scary of hopeless, I find it very difficult to read books about humans.
Reviews
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Preparing for Flight: Yaccaira Salvatierra’s Sons of Salt
Salvatierra’s poems embody the spirit of reclamation, reminding us to ask the wind and water to carry us, to remember our potential for flight.
“ew, don’t use my sound ever again”: On Tyranny and Poupeh Missaghi’s Sound Museum
Power is the end in itself, not a means to justice.
Giving New Life to Indian Literature: Aruni Kashyap’s The Way You Want to Be Loved
Kashyap’s stories, told through the accounts of the Assamese student, writer, researcher, and villager, made me see Assam on its own terms, and the rest of the world through the eyes of Assam.
A Silver Bowl of Stars: Blas Falconer’s Rara Avis
Whether “It’s a [family] story we don’t like / to tell” or the shifting of roles and a meditation on death “In the book we are reading together,” wisdom closes its hand over sentiment.
Danger Down Under: Fiona McFarlane’s Highway Thirteen
According to a website that calculates such things, the furthest city on the globe from my hometown in New York is Perth. Perth—I’ve heard of Perth.
On Living Dangerously: Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions
We are once again living through an age when this fight over the purpose of storytelling, whose stories deserve to be heard, and how freely ideas should circulate is heated.
“A Game of Chance You Can Choose to Play or Not”: On Lauren Russell’s A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close
[Russell] creates breathing room by breaking genre expectations, so that everything invisible swoops into stark relief.
A Search for Country and Identity in Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography Of
It is Falomo’s legacy of rebirth, in rich, outstanding text, that there are things which must burn in order to be birthed anew
On Inheritance: Maureen Sun’s The Sisters K
By recasting this Slavophile opus as a critique of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, with a grand sense of philosophical rigor, Sun models anti-imperial engagement with the Russian canon.
Please Please Please: Casey McQuiston’s The Pairing
Few romance novels hit such emotional and sensual highs with the leads physically apart; fewer still so elegantly capture the fluid contours of gender and desire.
Slant Panes of Light: Emilie Menzel’s The Girl Who Became a Rabbit
Meaning is fleeting. Meaning is self-made.