Books

Book Review: “V2” — Robert Harris’s Gentler, Kinder World War II

November 19, 2020
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This is history from a distance. Harris’s characters feel more real when they’re working out the equations that will make a missile fly or fall than when they’re fleeing a double agent or a misfiring rocket.

Book Review: “Kraft” — A Pitch Perfect Satire of Neoliberal Dreamin’

November 17, 2020
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A powerful allegory for our techno-crazed, consumption-addicted, soul-crushing times.

Poetry Review: Joshua Bennett’s “Owed” — Paying a Debt, Memorably

November 16, 2020
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Every exquisitely crafted line reflects the pull of a threatening body politic, the gravitational force of history.

Book Review: Karl Kraus’s Prophetic “Third Walpurgis Night” — Listening to the Music of an Ocean of Mud

November 13, 2020
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“Let my style capture all the sounds of my time. This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries. But later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud.”— Karl Kraus

Book Review: “Fangirls” — In Praise of Fanatics

November 10, 2020
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Fangirls is a funny and poignant survey of an essential coming-of-age experience.

Book Review: “The Silence” — Brusque Prophecy

November 7, 2020
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Many Don DeLillo fans will overlook this novella’s somewhat stilted dialogue and perfunctory erotic scenes for the sake of another taste of his dark and knowing world.

Poetry Review: “Any Song Will Do” — A Very Worthwhile Discovery

November 6, 2020
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Donald Levering’s poems exhort us to be less left-brained, to side more often with intuition, creativity, flights of fancy.

Book Review: A Brilliant “Homeland Elegies” — Indispensable Witness

November 5, 2020
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What Ayad Akhtar reveals, with stunning detail and a passion and an urgency rarely seen in American fiction, is that his is a story marked by a loneliness similar to that found in Melville, Dreiser, and T.S. Eliot, among others, and that puts him squarely in their company.

Book Review: Black Food Matters — “The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food”

November 4, 2020
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The Rise is the rare cookbook that does more than offer a culinary and educational journey. It inspires.

Book Review: “Glitter Up the Dark” — Music and Our Understanding of Gender Identity

November 3, 2020
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Sasha Geffen takes on some heady ideas about music and gender performance, but they approach the subject with a nimble writing style.

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