There is something about the wreckage that won’t settle on a beginning, or a single subject, the way a collision might also make one part of the rubble indistinct from another.
Return to Latvia – Marina Jarre
What it might have cost Jarre emotionally to face this awful truth, one can only imagine. But we readers are the grateful, if tearful, recipients of this revelatory largesse.
Second Star: And Other Reasons for Lingering – Philippe Delerm
Delerm calls on the body, mind, and visual field to preserve the essence of a moment. . . . [His] direct, humorous observations are both relatable and attentive to the largely unnoticed aspects of daily life.
Litt reveals himself to be more than just a writer, just as his diary is more than just a diary. In the end, we get everything, as promised: a life in a year and a year in a life—an everything diary.
Decolonize Museums – Shimrit Lee
While public funding continues to be slashed and institutions turn to private and corporate funders for capital, Lee reminds us that the need to “decolonize” has ethical implications that extend far into the future.
Unbound: A Book of AIDS – Aaron Shurin
Intimate and rangy, Unbound’s sixteen essays offer not only a nuanced portrait of the AIDS era but also a priceless guide for how to write about catastrophic collective and personal loss.
Tomas Nevinson – Javier Marías
Reality may be unruly and even illegible, and though we may want and even need to forget that at times, our escape is not without its consequences. Someone always pays.
One of [the book’s] chief accomplishments . . . is its depiction of the relationship between the “actual” longing for lost homeland and the “metaphysical” hunger that becomes a state of being.
With Kairos, Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.
Perma Red – Debra Magpie Earling
While set in the 1940s, Earling’s engagement with the complexities of reservation violence rooted in the traumas of settler colonialism and modern capitalism, make the story of Louise White Elk as resonant as it was when the novel was first published in 2002.