Moshi Moshi – Banana Yoshimoto
Grief is a full-body experience, but so too is joy.
White Elephant – Mako Idemitsu
It’s Japanese, obviously, but, this character is too close. Too much home. Too much — ugh, if I say she’s too much like me I’ll sound like I don’t know how to read books.
Me Against the World – Kazufumi Shiraishi
Cancer is suicidal, we learn. Ghosts are only capable of uninteresting platitudes.
Slow Days, Fast Company – Eve Babitz
I seek out books about Los Angeles because I want to sit in sunshine with babes and talk about stories.
The Great Latin American Novel – Carlos Fuentes
What is most characteristic of this collection is this hunger for interconnectedness, a genuine belief that books are rewritings of other books, that the novel is not so novel.
Diving Makes the Water Deep – Zach Savich
Savich’s book is as far from illness memoir as it is from self-elegy — is closest to what Keats once referred to as “the posthumous existence.”
Motherland Hotel – Yusuf Atilgan
I’m probably slightly more informed about Turkey than the average American. What that means in reading Motherland Hotel is that I creatively misread it.
How does one bear a separation that is both unbearable and permanent? are the questions they, and Nao, face.
Through Dixon’s work we come to recognize what is most “real” about human experience: the effort to understand it.
In SWING TIME…there is a sense of a very accomplished novelist approaching the first-person in a low gear, trying to avoid its antic conventions.