Beijing. Peking University Press. 2023. 334 pages.
To remind himself of the paramount importance of the philosophical tradition of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese Shang Dynas…
MISCELLANEOUS
- New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 258 pages. “New Experiences slipped through his fingers like grains of sand, never to be touched again.” My Father’s Brain: Life in the…
- New York. Flatiron Books. 2023. 304 pages. To many, mathematics is quite separate from literature; however, that is very far from reality. Mathematics has remained an indispensable p…
- Paris. Grasset. 2023. 256 pages. Born in Haiti in 1953, Dany Laferrière has been living abroad since 1976, mostly in Quebec, but also in Florida and in France. His first novel, How t…
- Mexico City. Penguin Random House. 2022. 647 pages. Bursting with intelligence and information, this compilation by the prolific cultural critic and intellectual Christopher Domínguez Michael is a va…
- Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2022. 240 pages. Groundglass is a lyric essay collection through which Kathryn Savage grapples with the idea of home and belonging in a world where w…
- Seattle. Fantagraphics. 2023. 184 pages. Graphic biographies are a fairly new phenomenon, and the genre definitely has legs. Graphic form can constrain the narrative via the conventi…
- San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2023. 259 pages. As journal-style prose, Out of the Sugar Factory draws on both history and literature to capture the world’s present and past fixatio…
- Dallas. BenBella Books. 2022. 320 pages. A good amount of caution is advised when approaching any work that claims to present a “theory of everything,” which “bridge[s] the gap between the quantum an…
- Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2022. 501 pages. It would be easy for readers to feel daunted by the scale of this volume. Totaling over a quarter-of-a-million words, with thirty-five contribu…
- New York. Pantheon. 2022. 394 pages. Ever since Art Spiegelman’s Maus first appeared—part 1 in 1986, part 2 in 1991—critics and readers have been arguing about it. The starting point for these discus…
- London. Alma Books. 2022. 358 pages. Is there anything authentically new to add to the already well-known story of the Romantic poet John Keats’s heartbreaking final days? Alessandro Gallenzi thought…
- Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2023. 400 pages. Elixir is the latest example of Kapka Kassabova’s knack for sensory and poignant nonfiction. Her previous books, Border and To the Lake, were two unforge…
- Minneapolis. University of Minneapolis Press. 2022. 292 pages. The truth hurts. Or as James Baldwin, patron saint of twentieth-century American literature and David Mura’s book, more insightfully put…
- New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 215 pages. Sarah E. L. Bowskill’s succinct study deals properly with the “never-ending network” discussed in her eighth and last chapter, which is ultimately the…
- Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Cambridge Scholars. 2022. 131 pages. In this monograph, Roberto Cantú critically revisits José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho some sixty years after its publication and scr…
- Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2022. 474 pages. Stephen D. Miller has assembled an engaging collection of fourteen short stories, numerous poems in varied forms, and two essays span…
- Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2022. 452 pages. Extensively researched and written with clear respect and affection for its subject, Fatima Bremmer’s biography of Sweden’s first investigative journalist d…
- Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Press. 2022. 176 pages. Mathematics has been feared by many and loved by some for its rigor, symbolism, and brevity. Literature on mathematics abounds with technical, b…
- White River Junction, Vermont. Chelsea Green. 2023. 224 pages. With an unwieldy subtitle for a somewhat unwieldy book, At Work in the Ruins is largely a continuation or an updating of an essay Dougal…
- Munich. Penguin Verlag. 2022. 185 pages. I eagerly awaited the new book by German writer Gregor Sander, released in spring 2022, because his clear yet multivalent writing has always left me wanting m…
- New York. PEN America. 2022 (©2021). 417 pages. IN KEN BURNS’S 2001 DOCUMENTARY series Jazz, saxophonist Branford Marsalis says, “The blues are about freedom. You know,…
- Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2023. 289 pages. SINCE THIS REVIEW is written by an essayist, rather than a literary critic or theorist, I should perhaps begin by sharing the…
- Madeira Park, British Columbia. Douglas & McIntyre. 2022. 184 pages. COMBINING PERSONAL MEMOIR with cultural history, Kinauvit? reflects Norma Dunning’s experience const…
- New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 268 pages. AFRICAN LITERATURES as World Literature is in the Literatures as World Literature series, described as “a novel appr…