Fire From Heaven – Michael Harrison
While occultists, scientists, and mystics quarrel over the evidence, somewhere a person ignites without warning and burns to a pile of waxy cinders.
This Glittering Republic – Quenton Baker
If there is any possibility of freedom, REPUBLIC suggests, it lies only in mutual recognition. But the brutality of racist violence seeks specifically to destroy the possibility of that recognition.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
These are ontological and epistemological accounts challenging the kind of Cartesian dualism and anthropocentric thinking Ghosh points to as giving rise to modernity’s deranged, novelistic view of our world.
Fictionalizing Anthropology – Stuart McLean
FICTIONALIZING ANTHROPOLOGY uses the decaying conventions of academic rhetoric to create a kind of speculative and essayistic social science nonfiction
The novel falters on the promise of its original plotting by resorting to cursorily drawn characters, prose that is often simply convenient or overreaching for poetry, and an unjustifiably cruel world.
To reissue a book involves hoping that history repeats itself, but this time with a difference.
My Heart Hemmed In – Marie NDiaye
NDiaye, who is half French and half Senegalese, drains the narrative of the usual markers of identity, leaving behind elemental psychological processes and beguiling allusions.
Goddess of Democracy: an Occupy Lyric – Henry Wei Leung
Through witnessing the movement as an outsider while reflecting on his complex position, Leung creates a rich, dynamic inquiry into our responsibility to one another.
Modern Love – Constance DeJong
He accuses her of robbing him of his ideas, his genius, making a mockery of his life’s work — not that he’s made anything. But Art is male energy in this equation, and there’s only so much subjectivity to go around.
Code of the West – Sahar Mustafah
Here are two representations of the country: One insisting unimaginatively as to what it takes to obliterate the nuances of social difference with blunt force, and the other just trying to get by.