This is an extraordinarily beautiful book, its present tense prose creating “an atmosphere of literature,” in Virginia Woolf’s words, its honest probing as illuminating as anything you will read about what it means to be Jewish.
Farrar Straus & Giroux
Book Review: “Cool For America” — A World of Dazed Impermanence
Hardly a portrait of glory from sea to shining sea, these tales drop in on estranged, lost, and overwhelmed people.
Book Review: “Parakeet” — A Wild Constellation
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.
Book Review: “Like Flies from Afar” — A Very Twisted Odyssey
This is hard-hitting neo-noir parable whose dark humor delights as it strikes at the corrupt heart of business as usual in Argentina.
Book Review: “You Will Never Be Forgotten” — Curiouser and Curiouser
Whatever might be dark about these stories may also be — since they’re reliably witty and frequently very funny — a welcome distraction and relief from current events.
Poetry Review: “If Men, Then” — Verse on Present Day Firing Lines
Because Eliza Griswold’s poems often take place in war zones, she’s always provocative — even when she is tendentious.
Book Review: Peter Handke — A Writer At War With Himself
The imperative to engage with landscape, and thus leave or at least minimize the self, has become of great importance to Peter Handke.
Book Review: Thomas De Quincey — A Memorably “Guilty Thing”
Frances Wilson’s biography of Thomas De Quincey is superb, written with enormous empathy and insight.
Book Review: “The Last Painting of Sara De Vos” — On Art and Forgery
You may have read similar earlier works, but Dominic Smith’s novel is in a class of its own.