What I like about essays is their sheer unpredictability and exuberance, their limitless range of subject matter, the way in which, within short compass, they give access to all kinds of perspectives.…
Recommendations
Anna Badkhen Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays New York Review Books Bright Unbearable Reality is a book of micro and macro scales: piscine, tidal, musical,…
In the past, regrettably, there has been a dearth of translations of Ukrainian literature available in English. This situation has dramatically changed over the last decade with numerous authors and…
Borders have always been a big bone of contention for Italy as a geopolitical entity. For centuries, its territory was fragmented, subdivided into city-states, duchies, seigneuries, run by local and f…
Ling Ma Severance Farrar, Straus and Giroux Severance is a zombie apocalypse tale, a workplace comedy, and a classic coming-of-age story…
Ai Weiwei 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir Trans. Allan H. Barr Crown Publishing Group Barbara Bloemink Florine Stettheimer: A Bio…
Peter Stamm The Sweet Indifference of the World Trans. Michael Hofman Other Press “PLEASE COME TO Skogskyrkogården to…
THE NOVELISTS Pat Barker and Douglas Stuart were both born into poverty, victims of the de-industrialization that swept like a wrecking ball through the British Isles during the…
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about how much of my own writing resembles “correspondences,” as my friend calls it, whether being conversations with visual artists such as Agnes Martin or E…
Kwon Yeo-sun Lemon Trans. Janet Hong Other Press LEMON BEGINS LIKE many crime dramas: someone’s been murdered and the police are interro…
I THINK I WILL FOREVER be just a little bit in love with young adult (YA) literature, no matter how old I get. While I’m not terribly discriminatory about genres, I do have ste…
THE LATEST BOOK by environmental writer Richard Heinberg finds him working with familiar material but with a new and insightful twist. In Power (New Society, 2021), Heinberg…
When we asked Yousef Khanfar, executive editor of the “Palestine Voices” special issue, to come up with a list of essential titles about Palestine, he shared with us the following curation of thir…
IN 2009, OUT OF THE BLUE or perhaps apropos of my essays, one of my relatives living in Cuba sent me an email scolding me for not keeping in touch while also telling me that I ha…
IN HER FOREWORD to The Town Slowly Empties (Headpress, 2021), Sasha Dugdale describes this slim hybrid as the author’s “lyrical diary of lock…
WHEN LYDIA DAVIS WON the Man Booker International prize in 2013, flash fiction made it into the sitting room of the house of fiction. Not just flash fiction collections appeare…
NICK KARY’S MATERIAL (Chelsea Green, 2020) uses the narrative tools of the psychogeographer to map the flows from human needs to the natural environment as…
Illustration by Chloe Cushman / All Saints’ Mountain by Olga Tokarsczuk POLISH SPECULATIVE FICTION in English is easy to find, if you know where to look: Twisted Spo…
BOOKS ALSO suffer crises. The book industry in Puerto Rico has always struggled to survive. In times of recession, the situation worsens; it is difficult for cultural projects to rece…
During quarantine, when not watching the news or reading a novel, I find my daily vision drawn to immediate surroundings: geese touching down in the parking lot where we safely walk (no need to come w…
AS WITH ANY CITY, there is no one text that conveys the singularity of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s, eighteen distinct barrios. But there are books that capture the spirit of it—the metr…
Lauren Camp Took House Tupelo Press I will speak of this wind . . . of the seams of desire. —Lauren Camp, “Remember It Was” The Greek mythological term o…
We asked several writers and our readers to tell us about a book that’s too heavy for beach reading, but they’re taking it anyway—if they’re able to get to a beach. Whether you (or they) are abl…
Nonfiction graphic narratives offer readers a powerful window into the lived experiences of the artists and writers who create them. In the hands of the right creator, the synergy of visual and verbal…
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN drawn to narratives of cities, both as a reader and as a writer. In the early stages of my writing life, I loved reading depictions of Paris by writers such as Stein,…
