Companion to an Untold Story – Marcia Aldrich
In the genre of literature about suicide, Aldrich’s book distinguishes itself by avoiding the urge to put the pieces back together again.
Margaret the First – Danielle Dutton
An inspiration for how one might approach one’s life and one’s art — “rejecting any clocklike vision of the world.”
The Folly of Loving Life – Monica Drake
Drake desperately wants us to know that hipsters have colonized, but we cannot lament loss without knowing what we’ve lost.
Willful Disregard – Lena Andersson
How the casual communication becomes the unanswered text, how the crush becomes unrequited love — that is, defined by lack — how someone becomes themself, alone, that phenomena deserves a novel like WILLFUL DISREGARD.
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?