We like feelings when we can print them out, if only because it’s that much easier to pick over the scabs. That’s why I like Twitter.
An American Suite – Pierre Joris
Joris’ un-tranquil spontaneity is effective, because it is grounded in dates and diaristic entries; I follow the linguistic digressions and am happy without cohesiveness, because they read like a sequence of thoughts during a particular hour on a particular date.
The Happy Marriage – Tahar ben Jelloun
While it’s tempting to read The Happy Marriage as a postcolonial exploration of marriage as a form of subjugation — and good deal of it is — it’s something else, too.
Black Lavender Milk – Angel Dominguez
Black Lavender Milk is a book haunted by itself.
This Should Be Written In the Present Tense – Helle Helle
Translator Martin Aitken has beautifully captured Helle’s streams of laconic sentences, many of them beginning with “I” plus a verb, that build to create this accumulation of sensory detail. Taken together, they accumulate into a compelling, rhythmic pattern.
On this Wedding D-day, the characters are balanced on a precipice: Will they move toward a revolution and remake the social order? Will the authoritarian regime hold things together? Or will absolutely everything come crumbling down?
Rather than falling into conventional narratives, eco-fiction needs to underscore the need for traditional environmentalism to question its own positions of privilege and provide a space for imagining non-normative paths to sustainability if it is to inspire genuine social justice.
When the Sick Rule the World – Dodie Bellamy
The path today’s Bellamy traces through her past is thus contaminated on every level, disdain for racism and brutality mingled with disdain for poverty, the development of better politics mingled with social climbing and self-exculpation.
Is The Vegetarian, devastating as it doubtlessly is, funny? The question feels almost perverse to ask, but only because the novel begins in the brilliant tradition of high, scrambling Kafkaesque comedy and then turns sharply away.
Complicated Grief – Laura Mullen
[Laura Mullen] adopts a new way of speaking about grief in every single chapter of this challenging work.