Even if we go nowhere, even if we staycate, our escape is always into rather than out from under the imperial gaze.
The Grave on the Wall – Brandon Shimoda
THE GRAVE ON THE WALL performs a memorial in linked essays to the author’s grandfather Midori Shimoda while scraping away at the grounds for such a memorial, for any memorial.
When our tiny tour group was called to join our guide, instead of flashy ghostbuster jumpsuit or LED-studded skeleton or goth employee just dressed regular, we got Steve.
If the book is about anything, it is about spiraling through the cultural implications of keeping the “we” in “me .”
Nights as Day, Days as Night – Michel Leiris
While “a fieldwork of the self” is clearly how much of Leiris’s other work operates, this book resists.
Me Against the World – Kazufumi Shiraishi
Cancer is suicidal, we learn. Ghosts are only capable of uninteresting platitudes.
The Voyager Record – Anthony Michael Morena
But an accumulation always threatens to stack, that is, threatens to make a tower and towers always point somewhere, reluctant teleology.