Books
Aminatta Forna has given us a novel that belies its modest premise, a book about how the human mind protects itself by not knowing, yet sometimes, due to unexpected circumstances, comes to terms with what it thought it could not.
A collection of poems and essays by the admired German poet Gottfried Benn, who, because of his brief association with Nazism, has been absent from our mainstream, non-specialized, English-language view of modern German poetry.
In “Some Day,” Shemi Zarhin has masterfully woven together a tangle of bittersweet tales and elusive dreams. it is a book that is a pleasure to read and reread.
We are left with a somewhat scattered narrative written in the third person with an omniscient narrator that moves from one inner life to another, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes leaving the reader stranded.
Nina Schuyler’s uneven novel raises some interesting questions in the course of the protagonist’s quest, and there are many fascinating details about Japan and Noh plays and the power of silence.
So is the book worth reading? Depends how interested you are in twentieth century cultural history, in music and creative genius, in marriage and sexuality.
The moral urgency and the humane distribution of Adelle Waldman’s authorial sympathy are evident everywhere in “The Love Affair of Nathaniel P.”
In a way, this collection of hip writing, a “literary mixtape,” is the ultimate embodiment of the vision of the Hipster-as-Curator.
Despite his weakness for overwriting, Bob Shacochis has a good and sad story to tell, and he gets through it with a degree of mastery.
Book Review: Julian Assange Trades Hopes and Fears With Cyberpunks
Any book in which the fourth sentence is “The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia” runs the risk of overstating its case from the get-go.
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