The Years, Months, Days – Yan Lianke
It is the confusion that comes with the real-life impact of intangible things that causes the most destruction.
So much poetry from writers of color is rooted in an immediate sense of identity and place; Leung is beyond that.
How to Write An Autobiographical Novel – Alexander Chee
Chee’s turns of phrase feel slightly awkward; a bit unfinished, while at the same time, complete and satisfying in a way that defies grammar.
Anaïs Nin: An Unprofessional Study
Ali fulfills the promise of performative embodied criticism best in co-creative sections with notes for art installations, a choreography, a symphony, or a film; that is, when he himself manages to reimagine the textual self and the world, as Nin’s deep preoccupation with the memory of the body allows us to do.
Sick: A Memoir – Porochista Khakpour
The public-facing myth of the good sick girl is a myth that Khakpour is intent on breaking throughout her memoir, and her crystal clear intent, the nuance, is successful.
It’s arguable that BELLY UP simply presents an allegorical South: maybe all the more evidently brittle and compromised, with an extra little shine of strangeness.
Lion Cross Point – Masatsugu Ono
The structure of his sentences is direct, but meaning is slant.
RUBIK is not the first to say that it is not the first to say what it is not the first to say; and yet, it nonetheless makes new.
The Eligible Age – Berta García Faet
Comprised of mostly declarative sentences verging on aphorism, THE ELIGIBLE AGE as a whole reads like a tractate.
The Job of the Wasp – Colin Winnette
When I pick up a work of literary horror, I expect something deeply disturbing, if not outright horrifying, and yet, a work that is more than a ghost story told around some midnight campfire, whose only purpose is to chill and thrill.