Rather than recounting a biography, Ernaux is writing into a silence.
A Very Cold Winter – Fausta Cialente
War, and its constitutive masculinism, threatens everyone’s dreams, chances, and sense of selves.
Rahul Soni’s translation makes space in English for a bridge between the historic and the contemporary, offering a critique of power across time and space.
The nose is not just cartilage and skin; it is inheritance, race, femininity, a mark of refusal, a repository of hatred and desire.
In Bianco, intellectual conviction slips into conspiracy.
At stake in such multitudes, of which Reza’s novel surely is another substantial contribution, seems to be a fundamental rejection of the premise of Adorno’s dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
The Woman Dies circumvented my critical brain: it made me laugh, shocked me, revealed my tastes to be safe rather than incisive.
In the Realm of Motes – Baptiste Gaillard
Human witnesses are nowhere in this book
Apotheosis of Music – Witold Wirpsza
For Wirpsza, a fugue can be a person, notes can be nails that stick in one’s head, and God himself can play the piano of humankind
In a Deep Blue Hour — Peter Stamm
“In a Deep Blue Hour, the latest novel by Swiss writer Peter Stamm, unfolds in . . . [the] interstice between documentary and narrative film, reality and fiction, memory and dream.”