Books
For a generation of Russians, Joseph Brodsky was the poet, almost a code-word in the discourse of the intelligentsia, like Nabokov.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri does little in The Family Clause to put his own spin on the usual domestic showdown of repression versus dreams of liberation.
In her novel Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier has given us an exhilarating spin on a long line of road-rebel mothers.
The text is littered with accusatory, staccato lines from mama Wince, whose conversations with her daughter achieve Carrie-esque arias of passive aggressiveness.
For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.
Despite her story’s potential for uncomfortable confrontations and revelations, the author chooses to pack the vicissitudes of her novel’s changing neighborhoods and their inhabitants’ lives into a neat and tidy package.
Parakeet is a virtuosic, perplexing, challenging trip. If it’s too disturbing a tale for this particular moment (it shouldn’t be), it may be a great work to explore in a year to come.
The Fallen artfully diagnoses the spiritual and material maladies of contemporary Cuban life through the lens of a single family, a household threatened by decay, exterior and interior.
According to Sarah Kendzior, “we have a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
Author Interview: Peniel E. Joseph on “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”
“Malcolm X and MLK evolved over time and came to converge in surprising ways. Malcolm’s movement for radical black dignity became a global human rights touchstone in a manner that made King’s struggle for radical black citizenship both necessary and more expansive.”
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