Language in Affiliate Modes: Twenty Capsule Reviews
Much of art consists in encouraging ourselves and others to not die, despite the world’s weight.
Slash and Burn – Claudia Hernández
Slash and Burn blurs the defined parameters of literary narratives of war, and the idea that violence has a clear beginning and endpoint, to create a searing vision of a “post-conflict” society and the quiet struggles of its ordinary members.
More Miracle Than Bird – Alice Miller
Alice Miller brazes together speculative and historical fiction into a remarkably sturdy bijou, using the conceits and feints of counterfactual to lend a certain permanence to the real woman time might otherwise be tempted to forget.
Valentino and Sagittarius – Natalia Ginzburg
Her novellas are containers for the cruelest of ironies, and the results are two morality tales, pushed nearly to the limits of realism.
To rely on memory is thus its own kind of slow violence, a delicate crumbling we cannot fully comprehend.
Pigeons on the Grass – Wolfgang Koeppen
Capturing a world of postwar American bravado and shaky transatlantic alliances, PIGEONS ON THE GRASS may encompass a bygone cityscape, but its inclusion of a troubled yet triumphant interracial relationship feels resonant to our current moment of international reckoning with racial injustice.
I did not read Lauren Oyler’s debut, FAKE ACCOUNTS, for fun, and I won’t say that’s what it turned into, because that would be something adjacent to a lie. I read it for the discourse.
Nina Power’s Platforms is a strange little book, a curious mixture of letter, poem, and meditation.
The Irresponsible Magician – Rebekah Rutkoff
The “I” is unstable, multiple, and identity is fluid in Rutkoff’s book of stories and essays, as she plays with the genres of fiction and autobiography.
Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography – Edgar Garcia
Garcia upends the distinction between diurnal intellection and nocturnal visions and free-association.