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.
These linked essays most closely resemble sessions of confession painfully eked out through much self-flagellation. The series of ruminations are a geography of particular obsessions.
The Surrender – Scott Esposito
The most fascinating aspect of THE SURRENDER is its project of reclaiming the thickness of language to describe a true self that is hermetically innate, but also temporally complex.
Reading From Behind – Jonathan A. Allan
Women, in READING FROM BEHIND, exist as oft-quoted scholars, but never as the sexual, multi-orificed and full-bodied humans that men are allowed to be.
The Party Wall – Catherine Leroux
The idea of the transplant is central to THE PARTY WALL, a polyphonic novel that uses ordinary lives to delve into extraordinary subjects.