The Right Intention – Andrés Barba
Barba’s undeniable skill lies in crafting convincing characters that feel like friends, or like enemies, or like people you hope never to meet, whose downfalls feel dangerously possible.
[MALAY SKETCHES] overlaps in terms of intention and effect, to an extent, with Frank Swettenham’s 1895 MALAY SKETCHES. The difference is that Alfian achieves what Swettenham could only attempt: to render the lives of a particular group of people authentically and humanely.
If the book is about anything, it is about spiraling through the cultural implications of keeping the “we” in “me .”
Objects from a Borrowed Confession – Julie Carr
Carr plays with the form of confessional writing, pulling the reader into personal stories of fear and death while maintaining a certain distance, purposefully working against the “I.”
The Consequences – Niña Weijers
How often can refusal be appropriated, marketed, sold and consumed by those who possibly cause it, before the only chance an earnest human has is stop making art?
One of these novellas is not like the other. The asymmetry, of course, is very much the point, and the contrast is inherently political. Together, the two parts ask, What ‘we’ can hold us?
Some reviewers in Great Britain have criticized Self’s trilogy for being too diffuse, too difficult. I found PHONE not diffuse enough.
Eight Lectures on Experimental Music – Ed. Alvin Lucier
While this elite benefaction may help to undergird the lucky artist’s work, it certainly does not offer a hell of a lot of relief to this lost listener who cannot afford their dietary staples.
The question of how we create meaning or value — which, Consiglio reminds us, are far from the same thing — when moving through a place serves as a structural principle in this collection where each story stretches out like a corridor with different rooms attached.
Where we can usually only view questions from one angle (we can never view words in the round; stand behind, or to the side of, the page), lazenby attempts to do otherwise, treating questions as statues.