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.
The same non-intervention the biologists practice on the island — not to leave a human mark on the fragile ecosystem and thus to merely observe, even when a baby animal is dying and could be saved by a small push in the right direction — is extended towards each other.
PROBLEMS is hypnotic and dank, an intimate gurgle from a person to whom you have become so endeared you decode it. And you know it’s beautiful.
Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens – László Krasznahorkai
Like Krasznahorkai’s fictions, his sentences (or in this case, series of clauses) conspire together, in a kind of interlocking state of indecision, building a sense of elusive, strangled exasperation.
Orthokostá – Thanassis Valtinos
If we lack for now the Great Syrian Novel, we may have to make do with Orthokostá and our ability to extrapolate from the Mediterranean country that gave us the word “chaos” to a more easterly Mediterranean country that now manifests it.
One Hundred Twenty-One Days – Michèle Audin
In fact, the historian admits defeat.