Books
“Politics is driven by language, and America’s peculiar history has given oligarchs the language to undercut democracy.”
This glimpse into the relationship of two American Jewish writers makes for good reading during the pandemic: an intelligent, gracefully written memoir of friendship.
The two books reviewed here represent the launch of the reborn Black Sparrow Press under the auspices of David R. Godine, Publisher. Very exciting. Let’s give them a big warm Boston welcome!
Good essays about art help us learn to see. Wonderful essays about the artists in our lives — which means all the artists through history, because, as Peter Schjeldahl so eloquently puts it, “all art is contemporary” —- help us learn how to live.
Marking Time explores how the creation of art in prison can disrupt institutionalized patterns of dehumanization. The book’s larger narrative comes with an overt political aim: “to envision and help create a world without human caging.”
The embrace of existential uncertainty in Cleanness enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator.
In these poems, contemplation, serenity, and service are the order of the day.
Vanishing Monuments is painstaking, in the literal sense of that compound word: it took enormous pain to make this book. It’s a novel that, for all its organizational strategies, reads with the immediacy of a memoir.
The fifteenth anniversary of the death of a grievously neglected writer whom critics almost universally acclaim a creative genius.
Told from the perspective of the Global South, this novel enthralls as it explores the urgent economic and cultural contradictions of post-colonialism, globalization, class, and alienation.
Music Commentary: Brian Wilson’s Legacy Thrives — 2026 Reissues Reviewed