Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
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A Ratio of Give and Take: Joyce Carol Oates’s Zero-Sum
Here, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.
In Ardent Defense of Intellect: Susan Sontag’s On Women
Sontag parses out how women were—and are—patronized, idolized, romanced, and discarded based on proximity to their perceived expiration date, whereas men age without the same discrimination.
As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.
The Cost of Belonging: Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
In this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.
The Burden of Being Real: Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special
To see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.
Twenty-five Years Unbound: Reading a Book of AIDS
The range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
On abandoning words: Carlos Fonseca’s Austral
Hidden within all these constellations and labyrinths of philosophy is a love story and a story about the struggle of a writer to find meaning in words.
Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson
Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
Confession of Grief: Katie Marya’s Sugar Work
Marya’s work is a slow burn; both sweet and salty, that picks up speed and ferocity as it unfolds.
Imagining a Worst-Case Scenario: John Vaillant’s Fire Weather
The boreal forests around the town do habitually burn, and its residents were used to seeing flames over their skies in summer months.