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.”
Concerning My Daughter – Kim Hye-jin
Tightly structured, carefully crafted . . . no word, symbol, metaphor, or nuance is wasted.
A Cigarette Lit Backwards – Tea Hacic-Vlahovic
I was, in my own JNCO ways, very much like Kat and maybe you were, too.
Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche – Vi Khi Nao
Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche is brutal—so brutal that one wonders how its author survived to write it.
The Flowers of Buffoonery – Osamu Dazai
This creator of moody, Dostoevskian heroes—toeing the line between brutality and beauty, cynicism and élan—has the kind of biography that threatens to overshadow the work itself, and that’s before you realize that most of what Dazai wrote is taken to be autobiographical.
A Private Affair – Beppe Fenoglio
In Fenoglio’s narrative of war, everyone is equally dehumanized and every story equally absurd.
The book asks the reader to reflect on the cost of indifference to the world, particularly as the state translates human life into the abstractions necessary for bureaucratic processing.
Fungirl doesn’t care: “Wholesome” is “nauseating.”
Affinities – Brian Dillon & We the Parasites – A. V. Marraccini
Together, these books advocate for a new way of inhabiting the works of art we admire . . .
Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery – John West
Offering readers an example of how to move through this process of creatively reshaping our identities, West gestures to the potential of each reader to experience rebirth and recovery.