Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller – Chloé Griffin
The point of fairy tales, in case you didn’t know, is that you must be pure of heart. The point of stars is that you want to be them. The point of saints is that when their bodies die they do not really leave us.
The Secret World of Oil – Ken Silverstein
In this era, some people go to war over religion. For other folks, oil will do.
Cautious Vitality: New Developments in Contemporary Czech Poetry
Czech poets want change, but if possible without the risk of creating explosions with their experiments and new approaches.
The Indescribably Real: Epic Memoir and Barycentric Fiction
The softening of the reader’s criteria for what can be permissibly worked into the novel format, processing real life through the story-teller’s eye for structure, implicates not only our literature, but reality as we experience it.
The Soul of the Marionette – John Gray
One gets the sense that [Gray] tells stories not to reach more people, but because he doesn’t think people are worth explaining things to. But then why write for popular outlets?
I never felt comfortable in groups of kids that I was told were “like me,” born disabled. Like Dolezal, I insisted that what you could see of my body was contrary to who I actually was.
Metcalf has recreated that uniquely readerly revelation of finding in unrelated literature of all kinds resonances and echoes that inform one’s lived experience.
The canon of world literature should not just reflect a liberal-humanist position.
By merely wandering, the dérivist frustrates the spatial logic of capitalism, in the process discovering new currents, fissures, and vortices of possibility within a deeply familiar space.
Nell Zink’s prose may not expand into rolling curls of unconventional syntax, but it is nonetheless difficult. Her mercilessly enjoyable prose leaves itself open to serious moral misinterpretation.