Essays Two by Lydia Davis | Star Tribune
Lydia Davis has thrice distinguished herself in the world of American letters. First, as a fiction writer (seven collections and one novel), then as a translator (Proust’s Swann’s Way, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, et al), and third, with the publication of Essays One in 2019 and now Essays Two, as an essayist. Continue reading…
The Women I Love by Francesco Pacifico | L.A. Times
The protagonist of Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love is writing a novel, and he has this to say about his literary project: “I’m recalling this period in my life to see if I’m capable of describing the women I love or have loved without turning them into caricatures, into saviors or sirens, into wives, mothers, or whores. I’ve grown tired of the comedy of the clumsy man who always makes the wrong move.” Later, he wonders, “what’s left for a man to write when he’s writing about women?” Continue reading…
Earlier this year, I noticed writers giddily posting images of their book covers paired with photos of Taylor Swift. The pairings were well-done, aesthetic matches in color and vibe, but that didn’t explain the authors’ excitement, which had a kind of “I’ve finally made it” flavor. The source, it turned out, was an Instagram account called Taylor Swift as Books (@taylorswift_as_books) run by Amy Long, a writer I knew through social media and her essay collection Codependence. I followed the account, DM’d with Long, and even had my books Swifted (which has emerged as the official verb for having your book featured). Continue reading…
Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall | The Rumpus
Steven Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, falls into a fuzzily defined genre known as slipstream. This term, coined by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling in 1989, never really caught on partly because its parameters are imprecise, but every few years a writer like Hall publishes a new book and the term rears its head again, like some kind of literary cicada. For Sterling, slipstream described what resulted when literary novelists appropriated sci-fi and fantasy tropes, including novels like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Sterling also included metafictional experiments like Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, and dark, Gothic tales like Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, in which nothing fantastical occurs but an unsettling and off-kilter atmosphere dominates. These kinds of works have been described as postmodern (Pynchon, Barthelme), magical realist (Morrison), or hysterical realist (Rushdie, Pynchon again, Zadie Smith), but none of those terms quite contains them all. If we reached back further, we’ll stumble onto terms like historiographic metafiction and satire and modernist and picaresque. More recent writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Téa Obreht, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ali Smith, Karen Thompson Walker, and Marlon James would, presumably, also exist under this enormous umbrella. Employing one single term for these disparate styles and approaches seems like an overreach, but devising an endless list of terms seems just as ineffective. Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment. Continue reading…
Build That World: On Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights
and Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd | Gulf Coast
I reviewed two excellent essay collections in the Winter/Spring 2022 issue of Gulf Coast. It’s a honor to publish in the journal founded by Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate. Check it out here!
For the sixth time, I have a review in The Georgia Review. For the Summer 2021 issue, I contributed an essay-review of two books that each deal with esoteric philosophy and the art of communication. Check it out!
Mirror Work | Be About It Zine #19
My short essay “Mirror Work” appears in Alexandra Naughton’s zine Be About It. You should order a copy! They’re only $3!
The King of Infinite Space by Lyndsay Faye | L.A. Times
Lyndsay Faye plays a kind of literary jazz. The author likes to riff on the standards, putting her own stamp on them as she jams. Her previous novels include inventive takes on Sherlock Holmes (“Dust and Shadow”) and “Jane Eyre” (“Jane Steele”). Her Timothy Wilde detective series and her novel “The Paragon Hotel” infuse a contemporary sensibility into gritty, evocative historical fiction. Continue reading…
What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction
by Alice McDermott | The Boston Globe
(My first review for The Boston Globe! New publications are always exciting, but this one’s particularly meaningful because I lived in Boston for many years and loved it there.)
In “Faith and Literature,” an essay from her first non-fiction collection “What About the Baby?”, the award-winning novelist Alice McDermott explains the origins of her fictional milieu: “I write about a culture I know fairly well in order to resist the siren song of research.” The culture she’s referring to is that of Irish Catholics, mostly in Brooklyn or Long Island, at various points in the twentieth century. McDermott, as one would deduce, was born in Brooklyn and educated in Long Island, the daughter of Irish Catholic parents—“a cradle Catholic,” as she describes herself. She regularly explores the way the past haunts the present, community mythology, alcoholism, and the life-altering effects of grief. Continue reading…
Long Division by Kiese Laymon | Tasteful Rude
The most interesting mystery novels don’t announce themselves as such. There is no murder to solve or culprit to apprehend. Rather, events which have no obvious explanation unfold and an air of ambiguity surrounds them. Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division belongs to this category of mystery. It is a bold narrative which, for more than half of its pages, withholds the nature of its machinations until an ingenious turn connects what had seemed to be a succession of unrelated cyphers. Continue reading…
The Last Man Takes LSD by Mitchell Dean & Daniel Zamora | L.A. Times
In 1978 and 1979, the French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures on neoliberalism, the set of economic doctrines focused on free market enterprise, limited government and individual autonomy. Foucault wasn’t interested in the nitty-gritty of actual governing. “I have not studied and do not want to study,” he announced in the first lecture, “the development of real governmental practice.” Rather, he was interested in “the art of government.”
Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology,
edited by Wendy and Tyler Chin-Tanner | Tasteful Rude
In 1976, five Black women sued General Motors because the company systemically prevented their advancement. The court, however, ruled in favor of GM because, as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw put it, “General Motors did hire women—albeit white women—during the period that no Black women were hired [and thus] there was, in the court’s view, no sex discrimination that the seniority system could conceivably have perpetuated.” The court then recommended that the case be consolidated with another race discrimination lawsuit against GM. A person, in other words, could sue for race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both, because claiming that there was a specific prejudice against Black women, in the court’s words, “clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.”
Crenshaw uses this case—and others—in her seminal paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” published in University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” because “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis.” A feminism that only addresses the experiences of white women is no true feminism, and an antiracist politic that only addresses Black men is similarly incomplete, as neither on their own addresses the experience and oppression of Black women. Though “intersectionality” has been expanded to include all manner of categorical intersections—including class, sexuality, gender identity, nationality, disability, and age—it began as a legal concept specifically referencing Black women. Continue reading…
Great Stuff, Cheers: Flannery O’Connor and I Read Proust |
Michigan Quarterly Review
In 1921, an American living in Rome wrote a letter to Marcel Proust. She tells him that for the past three years, she’s read nothing but In Search of Lost Time. This may lead one to surmise that she adores the seven-volume novel, but a fan letter this is not. Instead, she chastises the French novelist: “I don’t understand a thing, but absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, stop being a poseur and come down to earth. Just tell me in two lines what you really wanted to say.” If this reader found nothing in all of Proust’s writing, why then did she dedicate three years to it?
Literature is a bustling bevy of varying relationships: some last the length of a book or a poem or an essay—some only a paragraph or two. Others stretch on for years, decades even, and they shift and morph from platonic to romantic to antipathetic and back again. There is no monogamy here; the written word is polyamorous, pantextual. Literature goes on dates, trysts, booty calls; it rarely settles down. It is on-again-off-again. As in real-life relationships, we often spend the most time focused on people we don’t love or find reprehensible. But the feelings are deep and dense and rooted and real. Continue reading…
Merve Emre’s Critical Vision | The Chronicle of Higher Education
I spent five months getting to know the writer and critic Merve Emre and wrote this profile of her. She’s a hero of mine, so I’m honored to have this opportunity. Check it out here. Photo credit: Gordon Welters.
Mona by Pola Oloixarac | Tasteful Rude
Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (translated from Spanish by Adam Morris) is a devastating and harrowing satire of the literary world, an alternately hilarious and piercing examination of the culture surrounding books. Mona Tarrile-Byrne is a young Peruvian novelist nominated for a prestigious literary award, the Basske-Wortz Prize. She spends a weekend in Sweden with the other nominees as readings, talks, and convivial commiseration lead up to the announcement of the winner. A multinational cadre of writers weave in and out of Mona’s Valium- and Ambien-tinted experience over the few days that Mona temporarily leaves behind her ordinary life. Continue reading…
The Smash-Up by Ali Benjamin | L. A. Times
As I reread Ethan Frome in preparation for this review, I found myself admiring Wharton’s sumptuous descriptions and her ability to infuse every moment with a sense of inexorable tragedy. But I also wondered: Who the hell would want to retell this story in a contemporary setting? Continue reading…
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez | Tasteful Rude
Stepping into a Mariana Enriquez story, everything at first appears normal: people, furniture, lighting; it’s all there; nothing’s amiss. Yet an undeniable disquiet pervades. You don’t know why exactly, but you are certain something is wrong. Eventually and invariably, you discover that you are right. Though she has been publishing fiction and journalism for nearly thirty years in her native Argentina, so far only two books have been translated from their original Spanish into English: Things We Lost in the Fire and now The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. They are both story collections in which the oxymoronic phrase “magic realism” manifests to an extreme. They feature ghosts, witches, curses and cannibals while being equally rife with sexual violence, juntas, self-harm, and all manner of vividly rendered trauma. Continue reading…
On Walker Ryan’s Top of Mason and the Skateboard Scene | Los Angeles Times
Walker Ryan got two important things when he was fourteen: his first skateboarding sponsor and a box of books written by his grandmother. Continue reading…
Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age by Sara Wheeler | I reviewed Wheeler’s book on traveling contemporary Russia through the lens of great, 19th-century Russian writers for The Georgia Review’s Summer 2020 issue.
A Luminous Republic by Andres Barba | Chicago Review of BooksThe protagonist of Andres Barba’s novel A Luminous Republic is its premise: thirty-two mendicant children appear in the city of San Cristobal, make the local denizens uneasy, speak in an unintelligible language, commits acts of seemingly random violence, disappear into the jungle, and eventually lose their lives. Continue reading…
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor | On the SeawallHurricane Season begins, appropriately, with boys. Here is the first line: “They reached the canal along the track leading up from the river, their slingshots drawn for battle and their eyes squinting, almost stitched together, in the midday glare.” These boys, mere children, are already immersed in a culture of violence, ready for some imaginary battle their world tells them to prepare for. None of them “would dare admit he was scared,” as the others, even if they were afraid, would make merciless fun of him. These boys are the ones who find the Witch’s body. Continue reading…
Object Impermanence: On Kimiko Hahn’s Foreign Bodies | Vol. 1 BrooklynA caveat: Foreign Bodies is Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection of poetry, but it’s the first and only one that I’ve read. By my own standards as a critic, this lack of familiarity with a writer’s work usually disqualifies me as a reviewer of one of their books. The only exception I make for this is when I read a book that is so fantastic and exhilarating and rich that I’m compelled to write less of a review and more of a celebration, a fan’s note, a paean to a particular book’s achievements. This is one of those cases. Continue reading…
Control the Echoes | Yes PoetryA personal, poetical, and philosophical investigation of echoes, a new essay of mine up at Yes Poetry!
Against Style Guides…Sort Of | VultureThe notion of being taught language has always been oxymoronic because language is in a constant state of flux, a restless, malleable, impatient entity that, like the idea of now, can never be fixed in place. Take, for instance, the journey of the semicolon as chronicled in the delightful, enlightening new book by Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. The twisty history of the hybrid divider perfectly embodies the transience of language, the ways it can be shaped by cultural shifts that have nothing to do with correctness or clarity. Invented by the Italian humanist and font pioneer Aldus Manutius in the late-15th century, the semicolon was originally “meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon” (hence its design). Continue reading…
“The secret to life,” wrote Stanley Elkin, “is specialization,” and I think the same is true for conversation. Nowadays, anyone can comment on the latest article or news story foisted on the world by social media, but the most fascinating discussions come from deeper and more specialized sources: books. To read a well-written nonfiction book on any given subject is to arm you with a richer insight into its topic, so the next time you’re at a party or out with friends, you can actually tell them something they didn’t know. From George Washington to superbugs to sex, here are 20 nonfiction books to read by authors from whose expertise we can all socially benefit. Continue reading…
Costalegre by Courtney Maum |The year is 1937 and Leonora Calaway, a wealthy art collector, has gathered up the artists “the Führer decided were the most degenerate in Europe” and sailed to Costalegre in Mexico, where Surrealists and Dadaists, writers and painters, all live together to wait out the coming war. Continue reading…
Upcoming Fiction from Great Writers | Read It ForwardFiction, as an art form, requires an inordinate amount of time to perfect. Most novelists spend years crafting their books, and any reader with her salt can quite easily see why. No one, in other words, means to rush a novelist’s intricate work, yet the understandable gap between novels can seem interminable for us fans. The trick, I think, is to read as widely as possible, so that every month (or at least every year) promises new books from authors you like, thereby making the wait more tolerable for the ones by the writers you love. Continue reading…
Poets Who Shine a Light on Our Present Moment | Read It ForwardThe following poets, of varying ages and points in their careers, each tackle, from an eclectic array of perspectives, the dizzying complexities of being alive today. Whether through surrealist imagery or personal narrative, these collections help us zero on the lives and dreams of richly drawn individuals and communities, so that by experiencing a moment in the heart of one person, one family, or one geography, taken altogether we can create a mosaic that resembles, imperfectly but still vitally, the world around us. Continue reading… (Image: @yummypixels)
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett |Set in a richly rendered Florida and filled with delightfully wry prose and bracing honesty, Arnett’s novel introduces a keenly skillful author with imagination and insight to spare. Continue reading…
I reviewed Lost Time for The Georgia Review’s Spring issue. Check it out here.
Morelia by Renee Gladman | Publishers Weekly
Gladman’s strange and hypnotic novella depicts a woman moving through a dreamlike world and trying to find meaning in its inexplicable shifts. Upon discovering a sentence in a language that “wasn’t English” written on a piece of paper tucked inside one of her books, the unnamed woman attempts to figure out what it means. Continue reading…
Springtime in a Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti | Publishers Weekly
This rich, heartbreaking novel from the late Uruguayan writer Benedetti (1920–2009) (The Truce), first published in 1982, describes the devastating effects on one family of Uruguay’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s. Continue reading…
Social justice is a concept with many branches, and despite the fact that somehow the phrase has, in some circles, acquired a negative connotation, it is the harbinger of progress, the engine of civic betterment, and the hallmark of vital causes. Encompassed within the term are movements like civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ advancement, women’s and African-American’s suffrage, Brown v Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Black Lives Matter, the Stonewall uprising, and numerous examples of changed legislation. As a loose primer—or, more aptly, as a means to demonstrate the breadth and depth of it—here are seven books that cover different aspects of social justice. Continue reading…
Not a Clue by Chloé Delaume | Publishers WeeklyDelaume’s first novel to be translated into English is a sly and thorny work that loosely takes the form of a game of Clue, and even more loosely takes the form of a novel. The six murder suspects are psychiatric patients in Paris’s Saint-Anne’s Hospital, and each gets a few chapters providing their backgrounds, how they wound up institutionalized, and attributing to them a name from the board game. Continue reading…
Mars: Stories by Asja Bakić | Publishers WeeklyBosnian writer Bakic’s debut teems with the oddball narratives of George Saunders, the eerie atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe, and the feminist intellect of Marge Piercy. Her characters all, in one form or another, use language to survive, to manipulate, or to shine. Continue reading…
Books, as we all know, offer views into other worlds, journeys through unknown territories, engagements with unheard points of view, intimacies with the unfamiliar, and confrontations with the oppositional. They are transits into the other, guiding us—sometimes comfortably, sometimes perilously—through a world too big for us to travel in one lifetime. Through books we become voyeurs, co-conspirators, sidekicks, tag-alongs, psychics, and quantum leapers. They are our windows looking out over everything.
Anthologies go even further: they present a symphony of voices, ruminating on a single subject, a common theme, a unifying thread. They acknowledge in practice the truth that no one author can write the story for an entire group, so they collect disparate yet connected pieces to hint at the bewildering complexities of some of our most pressing issues. They amalgamate work from myriad backgrounds into, if not a representative whole then a satisfying unit that scratches at the idea of representation, like puzzles pieces that when put together form another, larger puzzle piece. Anthologies bring together writers and thinkers into a volume, and by doing so bring together readers into a necessary view of distant horizons. Continue reading…
The reason debut novels are so exciting is because it’s the chance to witness potential greatness at its earliest stage—there are no previous novels to live up to, no signatures or habits to look out for, and no end to what we can imagine a new voice will do in the future. With each novel by a first-timer that you enjoy comes another career to follow, another sting in the dizzying yarn knot of your literary interests, and soon every month brings out a second, third, or fourth novel by someone who you’ve read since the beginning and whose development you’ve traced like a proud parent or a sports fan. Continue reading…
New Year, New Verse: 4 Great New Poetry Collections | VulturePoetry ought to be the preeminent form of this age — hell, every age. In a smattering of words, a poem can eulogize, satirize, criticize, proselytize. The greatest verse clues us into what Jane Hirshfield calls “poetry’s knowing,” its function of “clarification and magnification.” It’s the quintessential hybrid form: an amalgam of essay, lyric, story, polemic, and diary. Poets are penguins, to paraphrase E.E. Cummings. They use their wings to swim. Continue reading…
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell |Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell’s novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel. Continue reading…
Trump Sky Alpha by Mark Doten |A blistering and heartbreaking satire in which president Trump brings about a nuclear apocalypse, Doten’s second novel (after The Infernal) is by turns a dystopian nightmare, a cyber thriller, a spot-on treatise on memes, and a tragic tale of love and loss. Continue reading…
For true bibliophiles, there is nothing lovelier than a volume of collected works. Such a book, filled as it is with a career’s worth of writing, isn’t meant to be read conventionally, from beginning to end, but can be nonlinearly perused, occasionally opened, to any old page, to one’s favorite piece, and enjoyed again and again. Add to this the fact that these collection contain all—or at least most—of an author’s work in a given form, which means when it comes to the collected writer, you’ve got them covered; never again will you have to seek out something they published, since you’ve now got everything they’ve produced in a handsome, stuffed-to-the-brim edition. Below you’ll find some recent collected works by some of the most influential and monumental talents in the world—a few you’ve no doubt read, while others may be new to you. But they all, in their careers, ran the gambit of subjects and themes, explored the outer reaches of their forms, and composed a rich array of poetry and prose. Continue reading….
Big Bang by David Bowman | Publishers Weekly“Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot?” asks Bowman (1957–2012) in the opening of his big, bold, and brilliant posthumous novel, and for the next 600 pages, he investigates what occurred in the years leading up to that monumental event in American history. Through the lives of such iconic figures as Norman Mailer, Elvis, William de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Spock, Ngô Dihn Diem, the Kennedys themselves, and dozens of others, Bowman conjures an enormous narrative out of the troubled years from 1950 to 1963. Continue reading…
21 Books Set in a Post-Trump World | Read It ForwardWhether we like it or not, this is the age of Trump. Maybe Trump’s actual presidency will last for four years (or maybe less, fingers crossed), or even eight, but the repercussions of his policies, his behavior, and the world’s reaction to him will be felt for much longer. Entire volumes could be written about the impact of Trump’s tweets alone. In less than two years of the Trump era, writers have engaged with our political landscape with renewed passion and indignation. Poets and short story writers have traced Trump’s disheartening influence, and even novelists—not always known to be the quickest to respond to topical politics, considering how long it takes to craft a novel—have already tackled, in various ways, our Trumpian climate.
Sometimes directly and sometimes less overtly, it’s impossible to deny the effect Trump’s election has had on literary art. Many have called this the “post-truth” era, but these 21 books show that great literature doesn’t lie like Trump lies—self-aggrandizing, fault-avoiding, and shortcut-chasing. Instead, literature invents in order to tell us hard-won and difficult truths. Deception conceals; literature reveals. Continue reading…
10 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime | Read It ForwardHere at Read It Forward, we talk a lot about new books because, well, we love books. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about the classics, those tried-and-true stories that never get old. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
Clever Gifts for Lifelong Learners | Read It ForwardWith so many how-to websites and YouTube instructionals out there, we often forget that books can still be used to teach us things—like practical, everyday things, as well as the weird, historical, and out-of-this-world. For those who’ve never lost that sense of curiosity, we present gifts for lifelong learners: books on all manner of topics, from science to history to economics and more. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
10 Gifts for Audiobook Lovers | Read It ForwardThere’s no wrong way to read a book—in print, on an eReader, or through audio. Audiobooks, for instance, can offer things that other forms simply can’t. With a talented performer at the narrating helm, an audiobook can enhance the depth of the characters through voice, capture the rhythm of the prose, and emphasize the emotional subtext of important scenes. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
10 Books Dad is Sure to Love | Read It ForwardFathers are notoriously hard to shop for, but really, who isn’t? And anyway, all dads are different: some love the conventional dad subjects—sports, war, and presidential biographies—while others take on all sorts of eclectic topics. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen | Publishers WeeklyKorneliussen’s captivating debut centers around five young people over the course of a party and its aftermath in Nuuk, Greenland, as they come to terms, in various ways, with their identities. Continue reading…
The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port | Kirkus ReviewsA rip-roaring journey through the early days of rock ’n’ roll, told through the lives of the men whose innovative guitars helped usher it into existence. Continue reading…
Jonathan Russell Clark 