Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2024. 344 pages.Matthew Kilbane’s The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media explores the intersections of lyric poetry and evolving techno…
MISCELLANEOUS
Trans. Martha Kuhlman. University Park, Pennsylvania. Graphic Mundi. 2025. 231 pages.Ever since the publication of the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1986, the grap…
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2024. 857 pages.In a study of the essay published over a century before this one, Hugh Walker’s The English Essay and Essayists (1915),…
Abiquiú, New Mexico. Casa Urraca Press. 2025. 96 pages.The book Hearts in Motion, Hearts in Place: The Quest for Querencias on Turtle Island and Abya Yala, by border…
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2025. 184 pages.There’s a peculiar electricity in reading Suzanne Jill Levine’s new memoir when you, too, are a translator of Latin American prose. For…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2025. 240 pages.The travel writer Pico Iyer broaches the paradox of learning from silence even while traveling. In Aflame: Learning from Silence, I…
New York. Liveright. 2025. 144 pages.There is no word for the color blue in the isiXhosa language. This is interesting but not important—for millennia, isiXhosa speakers have lived on…
New York. New Press. 2025. 224 pages.Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas is a collection of essays authored by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) that intricately…
New York. New Directions. 2025. 96 pages.It’s a strange feeling, encountering an item from yesteryear. We have all had the experience of happening upon an abandoned telephone booth, f…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2025. 384 pages.Across the globe, our cities struggle perennially with routine waterlogging and catastrophic floods, the result of several limitations in the s…
Barcelona. Tusquets Editores. 2023. 752 pages.With the late Javier Marías, Javier Cercas and Enrique Vila-Matas—both relentless nonfiction writers—are the leading contemporary Spanish…
New York. Apollo. 2025. 502 pages.Adam LeBor is the author of several thrillers set in Budapest, where he served for many years as the correspondent for such English newspapers as…
New York. New Directions. 2025. 192 pages.In the witty and curious essays collected in Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Yoko Tawada examines the deep roots and di…
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wiseblood Books. 2024. 76 pages.Tightly argued and curiously poignant, James Matthew Wilson’s monograph on the life and work of John Martin Finlay opens a previo…
Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press. 2024. 144 pages.Heather Clark’s mission in her second and considerably more compact study of the poet Sylvia Plath’s life and work remains the sam…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2025. 233 pages.“The world is chaotic . . . difficult to classify,” writes Ida Vitale, who considers an alphabetical approach the “most innocent opt…
Philadelphia. Paul Dry Books. 2024. 272 pages.Dana Gioia, one of America’s best living poets, also a critic and former chairman of the NEA, has gathered seventeen essays into his new…
Rochester, Massachusetts. Eastover Press. 2024. 304 pages.What Is It Like to Be Alive? is the question Chris Arthur ponders in this collection of fourteen seemingly unconnect…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books. 2024. 124 pages.I received my copy of Traveling Freely in the mail a few weeks before the US presidential election in November. It could…
New York. Mariner Books. 2024. 357 pages.Doubtless many readers of this annual anthology were, like me, anticipating its 2024 edition with some apprehension. Begun in 1986 by Robert A…
London. Seagull Books. 2024. 303 pages.Just as A Land Like You, Tobie Nathan’s novel, celebrates the fusion of Muslim and Jewish cultures in pre-Nasser Egypt…
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2025. 206 pages.Twelve years ago, Andrew Lam, a writer and journalist who left Vietnam as “a plane person” at the end of the Vietnam War at the ag…
University Park, Pennsylvania. Graphic Mundi. 2025. 160 pages.Prose can be a visually descriptive medium, but it is not without limitations. This may explain why journalist Yazan al-S…
New York. Crown. 2025. 256 pages.What does a sixty-four-year-old gay, white college professor and literary translator who grew up in small-town Oklahoma have in common with a thirty-t…
Curated by Collective Antigone. Oakland. University of California Press. 2025. 336 pages.“Writing is the highest form of resistance,” articulates acclaimed Egyptian journalist and wri…