A Czech Dreambook – Ludvík Vaculík
One job for intellectuals in a crisis might be not just arguing the right point but also the art of showing one’s working.
Russo does not really argue for the entanglement of epilepsy with the person who suffers from it. WAVE ARCHIVE embodies this entanglement, and never settles into a conclusion.
Cat in the Agrahāram and Other Stories – Dilip Kumar
Kumar is a writer of proximities, a poet of the close-quartered soul, so it’s not surprising his command of atmosphere is masterful; his stories emanate a sense of the simple density of life.
For fans of Everett’s more satirical fictions, Telephone might seem like a wayward attempt at conventionality, but behind the homebound setting’s realist framing is a novel no less attuned to the culture around it.
Had I Known – Barbara Ehrenreich
Thoughtfully selected and arranged, the chronological staggering of the texts in this volume underscores parallels across Ehrenreich’s more than three decades as a public intellectual and political commentator.
Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode – Don Mee Choi
The essay is a tightly woven crystallization of ideas that appear throughout Choi’s work, including linguistic nonequivalence and one’s sense of home under neocolonization.
The Book of Sleep – Haytham El Wardany
THE BOOK OF SLEEP leaves us with the triad of sleep, revolution, and poetry, each inseparable from the other. When we separate life from its utility, we come closer to free play, to liberation as an ever-ongoing struggle.
American Grief in Four Stages – Sadie Hoagland
Hoagland’s stories show the power of grief over time, and the stories reshape us.
Dreams of Being – Michael J. Seidlinger
A tightly wound novel that waxes philosophic on artistic identity and creative struggle.
Death in Her Hands – Ottessa Moshfegh
The open-endedness of Vesta’s mystery fulfills itself, because as Vesta said, “The last thing anyone should do is stuff her head full of other people’s ways of doing things. That would take all the fun out.”