States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic – Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris
The isolation, the fear, the breaking of actual communication, and the lack of touch draws together Camus’s worlds and our reality.
The Bad Angel Brothers – Paul Theroux
In short, no fun, the having of a brother.
Bright Unbearable Reality – Anna Badkhen
Without awe, how can we dream up a different reality? Without wonder, the dark matter of possibility, how do we find the courage to zoom in on our unbearable humanity?
Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below – ed. Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi
Many of the people we encounter in the pages of this book do not identify as smugglers but as workers of various kinds.
Divination with a Human Heart Attached – Emily Stoddard
These poems leave us with a gentle litany of things left behind—things more suitable, perhaps, for the more subtle shades of grief.
Lost in the Long March – Michael X. Wang
[The novel’s] layering surpasses anything like theme or plot and suffuses into a kind of aesthetic ethos which justifies the old saying: The novelist picks up where the historian has to stop.
Health Communism – Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Health Communism thrives with the inbound hope of any manifesto—the naming of violence as a source of potential political revolution.
Though Kivland resolved not to speak about herself, the pages are dotted with first-person asides in brackets: dreams, flashes of memory, brooding.
Everyone should be so lucky to be wholly consumed at least once in life.
For any seducer, whether it is Prince or a more proximate old flame, withholding is the grammar.