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…
Jonathan Russell Clark 