Perfumed by Fear: Silvia Guerra’s A Sea at Dawn
Guerra attempts to maneuver around obstacles with riverine language, and tensions organize around this effort.
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A Cult of Translation: Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey
Readers preferring more straightforward narratives won’t find one here.
A Manifested Destiny: Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations
There is the power of money and its capacity to corrupt—money that flows often from the pockets of wealthy white men but sheds some green onto any hand it touches.
A Palestinian Voice in Gaza: Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Here, the will to survive outlasts destruction. Here, Palestinians in Gaza coalesce with the land and its resilient growth and beauty.
Genius or Madness: Patrick Langley’s The Variations
Like a piece of music or genetic code, the gift changes over time and according to who is experiencing it. Langley’s novel traces the shifts.
Punctuating pseudo-realities: Daniel Lefferts’s Ways and Means
This is a world in which the “ways and means” of the novel’s title are no sure thing, in which the relationship of the protagonists to the money they have (or don’t have) easily exceeds tangible causality.
The Potential Literature of Life: Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Stop talking to anyone, everyone, about your new projects—just be quiet and think.
Curiosity is the Devil’s Lure: Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark
Colanzi is rebelling against the loss of collective memory of tragedy, against the unbearable fact that things go back to normal faster than they should.
Let it tremble in riotous beauty: Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s To Love an Island
Our love should make us quake, quake like a storm, a storm that tears down “the whole blood-marbled edifice.”
The Gravity of Displacement: Balsam Karam’s The Singularity
A refugee tale is always about the children, not least because they are the tellers.
Our Anesthetized Culture: Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld
You can probably describe your algorithmic content with a comical level of detail—the unsolicited stuff you’re targeted with each time you go online. Mine includes nail art, vegan-alternative recipes for…
Psychedelic Revision: Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dream of Empires
It is in their form—ravaging, dumb, dreamlike, free—that we can glean momentary order from Enrigue’s comic humor.