Divide Me By Zero – Lara Vapnyar
Like Barthes’ Mourning Diary, Lara Vapnyar’s poignant, sensitively observed novel can be read as an act of demystification, a study of lost love.
Keeping / the window open – Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop
When I talk to my students in workshop about “your ideal reader,” the example that’s in my mind but I never say out loud is this: me reading anything Rosmarie has written.
The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter – Rosmarie Waldrop
Like the title’s hanky fluttering out of a castle window and settling in some mud, this novel’s narrator flickers about time, space, memory, fact, and conjecture.
The great news is that if you’re not looking for a cardigan in book form, then ALL MY CATS is an extraordinary, heartrending read.
Animal Suicides – Angela Veronica Wong
Here, now, thresholds blur, and we must confront our presence in our absence, our environmental impact across even the most intimate parts of our lives.
The island of Pigs is the locus of multiple abrading – one can almost hear them shifting and grating – layers of meaning.
The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas – Daniel James
This is postmodernism on steroids.
Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader – Steve Abbott
One had to have an archivist’s obsessive streak to really get to the heart of Abbott’s oeuvre, and so for many years, those who had read bits of him here and there were deprived of really knowing his true genius.
Beyond Aesthetics – Wole Soyinka
Soyinka rails against the iconoclastic destruction of traditional African art and the careless treatment of its conventions.
Welcome to Hell World – Luke O’Neil
The take away from every essay is not merely that life is terrible, but that powerful people choose to make it so for their own ends.