Books
For a generation of Russians, Joseph Brodsky was the poet, almost a code-word in the discourse of the intelligentsia, like Nabokov.
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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.
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In her novel Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier has given us an exhilarating spin on a long line of road-rebel mothers.
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The text is littered with accusatory, staccato lines from mama Wince, whose conversations with her daughter achieve Carrie-esque arias of passive aggressiveness.
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For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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According to Sarah Kendzior, “we have a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
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Book Reconsideration: “A Confederacy of Dunces” — Still an American Comic Masterpiece?
A reassessment on the 40th anniversary of A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel that many consider one of the funniest ever written by an American.
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