Books

Book Review: “Marking Time” — Documenting the Visual Arts in American Prisons

May 22, 2020
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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.”

Book Review: “Cleanness” — Eroticism as a State of Being

May 22, 2020
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The embrace of existential uncertainty in Cleanness enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator.

Poetry Review: “The Mother House” — Poems with the Demeanor of Nuns

May 19, 2020
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In these poems, contemplation, serenity, and service are the order of the day.

Book Review: “Vanishing Monuments” — An Unforgettable Memory Palace

May 18, 2020
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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.

Literary Remembrance: Homage to Guy Davenport — Brilliance Worth Savoring

May 18, 2020
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The fifteenth anniversary of the death of a grievously neglected writer whom critics almost universally acclaim a creative genius.

Book Review: “The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana” — A Caribbean Hamlet

May 17, 2020
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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.

Children’s Book Feature: Worried about Home Schooling? Relax — and Read

May 14, 2020
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Even though options for parents abound, the very best option remains the simplest — pick up a book, snuggle up, and read.

Book Review: “Telephone” — Sounding Alternatives

May 12, 2020
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The “choose your own adventure” turns out not to be a gimmick; setting up alternatives makes Telephone more affecting than Everett’s self-consciously directionless narrative may deserve.

Arts Appreciation: Howells in the Dark — William Dean, We Still Hardly Know Ye

May 11, 2020
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A hundred years ago today one of the most influential writers and editors in American history, William Dean Howells, died in Manhattan at the age of 83.

Book Review: “Tyll” — The Thirty Years War, From a Prankster’s Point of View

May 10, 2020
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Daniel Kehlmann’s narrative gift is so prodigious as to be almost aggravating.

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