The Seaplane on Final Approach – Rebecca Rukeyser
Mountains and bears and ice floes are hardly cheap lipstick and pleather jackets, but to a hormone-addled teenager, anything and everything looks like sex.
I wanted to see how much I could smuggle into this novel that isn’t necessarily aimed at the kind of readers I’m used to, like my friends or the broader literary community.
Prophetess – Baharan Baniahmadi
Slowly, she begins to sense the presence of all the world’s women in her own body, women who have been wronged by men or society in general. These voices fill her, erasing her own.
Beloved of the Dawn – Franz Fühmann
[Fühmann’s collection] taps into the depths of the human condition—the grotesque and the intimate, the proud and the petty, the mortal and immortal.
It’s a mistake to place the classic authors on a pedestal, but also to ignore their problematic histories to glorify the present.
Somewhere between mathematics as melodramatic caricature and migraine-inducing combinatorial, what about a third way?
Simply existing, writing through doubt and degradation, is a Native way of being in literature.
Writings on the Other Animals – Manuel Becerra
It isn’t intuitive to love the toad.
Shope’s strength is marking the marginal shifts and mechanisms of power between patient and doctor.
There are times where the real subject of [Muratov’s] description seems to be not examples of art, places, or even people, but the relatively fleeting moments in between these things, which appear here almost by accident, like bystanders in a Polaroid.