Texas: The Great Theft – Carmen Boullosa
It’s an interesting counterpart to a mainstream Anglo-Texan version of this history that erases the violence.
The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell – Carlos Rojas
I’m not sure I need to know this Lorca.
It’s unclear at what point you start to feel the depth behind Koster’s acrobatic balance of elegant narration, disgusting violence and acerbic satire. It’s this subtlety that takes the book beyond caricature and into complexity.
The Polish Boxer – Eduardo Halfon
“As we write, we know that there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn’t forget it. But always, without fail, we do.”
A brief, slashing incision deep into the fasciae of postmodern society.
Almost Never is like a comedy of manners cut with a pulpy erotic novel, a social satire impelled by a dripping lecherousness. Most of all, it’s a fantastic, exciting book.
It’s a difficult truth about being a member of a special-status group, a group that has to deal with its identity politics, that you have to make a decision about how to participate in a troubled and often troubling discourse.
Libraries: the future is underground
Meet the Mansueto Library, the University of “greedy-for-books” Chicago’s new window-dome reading room and underground book storage facility.
The Outlaw Album – Daniel Woodrell
These characters live in a liminal world between humanity and animality—it’s a world of random cruelty, unresolvable loss and loneliness, poetic revenge and equally poetic semi-articulacy.
People haven’t gotten that far protesting individual issues, because in this sea of laws we live in, there are five to replace the one you get overturned, and the very thing being protested is the totality of the system of economic oppression.