Reviews

The History of America in My Lifetime – Brooks Sterritt

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A satire of our data-driven societies, of modern surveillance systems, and of the irrationality of the Western world, it is a novel about capitalist America and our struggle to understand it.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance – Irene Solà

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a novel brimming with hope for future generations, and for the vitality of the Pyrenees mountains.

There’s a Disco Ball Between Us – Jafari S. Allen

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Lyrical, genre-bending writing, which undoes, unstitches, and shakes off normative ideas about how Black/gay life is conceived and lived

Far Sector – N. K. Jemisin

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Jemisin understands what works about superhero books and then uses it to move the readers through a narrative so subjective that they are forced to deal with some of the most profound political crises we have just lived through.

Warning to the Crocodiles – António Lobo Antunes

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With his use of pitch black humor and his precise attention to humanity (and the ways humans can be humiliated) against a broader historical backdrop — this supposedly impossible fusion of aestheticism and social reference — Lobo Atunes’s fictive worlds seem inexhaustible.

Prosopagnosia – Sònia Hernández

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Prosopagnosia is a metaphysical novella, a fictional vision of a permanent problem in human experience, rather than a dramatization of social tensions.

Insignificance – James Clammer

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By portraying a seemingly insignificant but accurate world, Clammer has managed to produce a novel that in its own charming, offbeat, blue collar way, feels highly significant indeed. 

ELADATL – Sesshu Foster & Arturo Romo

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Experimentation like this can sometimes lead to cold, hollow results, but ELADATL also contains a heart, as well as beautiful passages befitting a scenic balloon ride through a shared dream.

Vormorgen: The Collected Poems – Ernst Toller

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Mathilda Cullen’s translation of Ernst Toller’s poetry is a labor of love, recovering the all-but-forgotten literary legacy of an enigmatic figure

The Dog of Tithwal – Saadat Hasan Manto

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Manto is an outlier, a freakish occurrence at a freakish time in South Asia.