The Young Bride – Alessandro Baricco
This novel is a captivating, fable-like story about a family that lives each day the same as the last in order to suspend the passage of time. It is a quirky, beautiful, and warmly humorous reflection on how the fear of our own mortality affects the way that we live our lives.
Three New Story Collections, Five Ways
Mainly I want you to finish the review thinking things like, Hm, maybe I should read that book, or Maybe I won’t read it, but at least I have a clear sense of it! (And, most important of all, Wow, that guy knows a lot about the New York Mets!)
What really saves MISCHLING is Konar’s astonishing lyricism. Against Adorno’s statement, here there is poetry in everything.
Describing the Past – Ghassan Zaqtan
And I do not mean to elide that these stories are Palestinian, as is the loss they both recall and presage.
Aloha / irish trees – Eileen Myles
A record of attempts at articulation.
I Hate the Internet – Jarett Kobek
This book, a paperback novel published by a small press that features several typos, sits outside this circuit of communication, but at what cost?
Beautiful, precise and insightful, Walsh’s autofictions muse on life’s imperfection while insisting on liberation through the defiant and naked voicing of the truth of the self pinned at a point in time.
The Service Porch – Fred Moten
Moten’s poetry crafts a situation in which the melody stays hidden. He never plays the head of the composition, even if he alludes to the conceptual sphere of the movement.
Multiple Choice – Alejandro Zambra
Coherence and logic are not inherent to human experience. Life is paratactic. Causality, the root of arguments and anguish, is the product of a rigorous and motivated training.
Where is violence manufactured? What styles allow and encourage our conditioning, our reproducing? How to be in systems that place you in permanent states of negation?