A Country Road, A Tree – Jo Baker
Of the four big Beckett questions that have long beguiled Beckettians, Baker’s novel takes discerning throws at three.
The Reactive – Masande Ntshanga
He is an HIV-positive person for whom HIV is operating, surely, as a metaphor.
The Association of Small Bombs – Karan Mahajan
Both this novel and its readers deserve better than this easy image of terrorist as sexual brute.
Among Strange Victims – Daniel Saldaña París
What does it mean to participate in a literature wherein novels and writers are described, as José Donoso laments in The Boom, as “too cosmopolitan, too intellectual . . . absolutely not what is expected from a Spanish American novelist”?
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador – Horacio Castellanos Moya
The novel reveals as much about Bernhard’s style as it does about Salvadoran society.
The Hatred of Poetry – Ben Lerner
Lerner notes the many things his book doesn’t do, perhaps succeeding by suggesting a potential better book. But it still doesn’t do them.
Into this web of familial discontent and uncertainty enter those mysterious dogs.
The Sky Isn’t Blue – Janice Lee
This is Bachelard for the age of the digital memory, the confessional Bachelard.
Here are some other technologies that humans control despite a barely functioning civil society: Nuclear weapons. The Internet. Drones. Here are some archetypes that don’t appear in this novel: Gringos. White people.
Letter to the Amazon – Marina Tsvetaeva
[Marina Tsvetaeva] responds to [Natalie Clifford] Barney’s celebration of lesbianism largely through the lens of her own experiences in a homosexual relationship and with her regret-tinged return to a heterosexual one.