Unbound: A Book of AIDS – Aaron Shurin
Intimate and rangy, Unbound’s sixteen essays offer not only a nuanced portrait of the AIDS era but also a priceless guide for how to write about catastrophic collective and personal loss.
Tomas Nevinson – Javier Marías
Reality may be unruly and even illegible, and though we may want and even need to forget that at times, our escape is not without its consequences. Someone always pays.
One of [the book’s] chief accomplishments . . . is its depiction of the relationship between the “actual” longing for lost homeland and the “metaphysical” hunger that becomes a state of being.
With Kairos, Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.
Perma Red – Debra Magpie Earling
While set in the 1940s, Earling’s engagement with the complexities of reservation violence rooted in the traumas of settler colonialism and modern capitalism, make the story of Louise White Elk as resonant as it was when the novel was first published in 2002.
Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City – Jane Wong
What does it mean to be a good immigrant daughter? What does it take to be regenerative, resistant, and nostalgic?
Standard American English – Elisabeth Houston
Houston refutes language, or at the very least refuses to be authored by it.
A History of the Island – Eugene Vodolazkin
Looming large in the minds of the citizens is a prophecy of final doom by Agafon the Forward-Looking, recurring in moments of political instability.
When disabled writers are often expected to display the most personal aspects of their bodies for the consumption of able-bodied readers, Muenz rejects self-objectification in favor of a deeper form of seeing and being seen.
For an elegiac work, Hervelino has little in the way of lamentation or solace. “Death was there, there was no theorizing it or solving it.”