Frank O’Hara’s Notorious B.I.G.
The affinities between New York’s most mercurial lyricists.
The Unmapped Country – Ann Quin
The substance of Ann Quin’s novels are not to be found in their stories but in the ways in which Quin displaces the story without ever quite abandoning it.
What should we expect of a novel? A momentary escape from gray-skied reality? A catalyst for personal realization? Census provided none of these possibilities for me.
English-language Poetry in Hong Kong Now
We can certainly no longer say that ‘[t]here is no English-language literary community from which to draw some kind of affinity or against which to react’. One just has to go out, be receptive, join a group, and meet and mingle with other like-minded people.
Empty Set – Verónica Gerber Bicecci
How do you render negative space, and if you can accurately describe it, is it really negative?
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
It’s a work wherein that which is nascent only moves in a single, inevitable line, to onomatopoeic beats of the novel’s closing words, “widdeboom, widdeboom.”
THE ANSWERS is a novel of great lucidity and actuality, an unsettling book that offers no answers but still provides provocative insight into some of the most frightening ethical questions of our times.
Typescript of the Second Origin – Manuel de Pedrolo
It was, perhaps, as if Frank Herbert had accidentally written THE HUNGER GAMES.
She’d jotted down many questions, each marking a point on a borderline in the text where either her concentration failed or her resistance to Suah’s narrative succeeded. Passages underlined in blue, margins filled with wavery scribble; the train had been rocking back and forth.
The Right Intention – Andrés Barba
Barba’s undeniable skill lies in crafting convincing characters that feel like friends, or like enemies, or like people you hope never to meet, whose downfalls feel dangerously possible.