The Disappearing Act – Maria Stepanova
Hundreds of eyes are looking at her, seeing not the novelist but some other unknown person
Lola the Interpreter – Lyn Hejinian
In Hejinian’s syntax of personhood within and around community, the self fits in only precariously among others.
The project became much more interesting to me as a novel, as satire, and as something with a lot of psychoanalytic dimensions, around the melancholic incorporation of voices of people whose politics we deeply reject.
Within each coupledom, clothing represents a tug of war for power
whitewards – Katarína Kucbelová
Who wants to simply disappear, no longer an individual but only an undefined part of some larger, homogenous body?
I like that idea that forgetting can be generative. And I would add that forgetting is sometimes necessary to learning, to change.
Letters to Kafka – Christina Estima
It’s a blaze of an affair, two intelligent people who deal with words
Traumatic Brain Novel: Debut Fiction from Esinam Bediako and Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
There’s a temptation, when we talk about illness and disability in fiction, to treat the body as either a tragic backstory or an inspirational obstacle course. These novels do something else.
The Lenin mummy has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for more than a hundred years now, after all.
My Dreadful Body – Egana Djabbarova
For Djabbarova, the body functions as a palimpsest of symbols