Melbourne. Scribe. 2019. 149 pages.
Made in Sweden is, Elisabeth Åsbrink tells us, an expression of conditional love: “I love this strange country in which I happen to be born. But my love is…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 304 pages. Kafkaesque is bureaucracy and red tape and all such things, of course, but more profoundly still it is the overlap between life and writing, reali…
New York. Penguin. 2019. 336 pages. Why do we permit companies like Facebook and Google to gather behavioral data on minors? Why do we allow Google to scan our emails, including emails sent to us from…
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Etruscan Press. 2019. 194 pages. Demonstrategy: Poetry, For and Against is a difficult but important book. The difficulty starts with the title(s), and the best wa…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 216 pages. Lawrence Venuti is the lightning rod of translation studies. Among his most enduring contributions to the field is his claim that publishers “d…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 299 pages. At age ninety-two, Robert Bly is releasing simultaneously his Collected Poems and his collected essays, Looking for Dragon Smoke…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 432 pages. Immensely timely, this major work feels hot off the press. The Charleston massacre in 2015 initiated a debate about southern monuments celebratin…
New York. Random House. 2019. 303 pages. Jia Tolentino’s collection of essays, Trick Mirror, is a critical study of the internet age, capitalism, and religion through the slant of her own con…
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Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2019. 152 pages. Less than a year after the birth of my son, I sat in a coffee shop with my brother—even more newly minted as a parent himself—and we both, I imagine,…
New York. Pegasus Books. 2019. 338 pages. Our Man Down in Havana pulls out some threads from the complex story behind the writing of the famous satirical novel Our Man in Havana (19…
2 vols. Kraków. Wydawnictwo Znak. 2018. 857 & 958 pages. Andrzej Franaszek once again undertook a gigantic task when, after his successful biography of Nobel Prize–winning Polish author Czesław Mi…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 336 pages. Pagan Light takes the reader to Capri, a small island just south of Naples, for a look at its history as an artistic and sexual refuge, w…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2019. 256 pages. The first thing you notice about This Woman’s Work is the image of struggle on the cover—a girl pushing away a polar bear—a metaphor that is…
New York. Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. 215 pages. In the insightful introduction to her latest book, Nyla Ali Khan remarks that the “primary readership will comprise students and scholars of South Asia.”…
Salt Lake City. University of Utah Press. 2018. 352 pages. Arranged in four thematic parts, Reimagining a Place for the Wild is a collection of essays and narratives that ranges across discip…
New York. Hogarth. 2019. 160 pages. Han Kang’s The White Book is a meditation on grief using a study of white objects in the author’s life to spark memories of events she did—and did not—expe…
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Cambridge, UK. Polity Press. 2018. 222 pages. The problem of carbon is challenging every aspect of society today, and there are no easy answers. Kate Ervine, a faculty member in the International Deve…
New York. Scribner. 2018. 288 pages. Revisiting and then capturing the past, especially a historical past, always requires an exercise in imagination. Moreover, when the imagination has been informed…
New Delhi. Bloomsbury India. 2018. 170 pages. The ethnic cleansing and mass migration of Hindus and Sikhs from the provinces that became Pakistan in 1947 form an important current of twentieth-century…
Paris. Futuropolis. 2018. 319 pages. Renald Luzier (“Luz”) started drawing for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 1993 and eventually became one of its best-known cartoonists. On Jan. 7,…
Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Cherokee Nation. 2018. 278 pages. The team behind Cherokee Nation is a veritable powerhouse. Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, has ro…
Edmonton, Alberta. AU Press. 2018. 312 pages It is significant that Meenal Shrivastava’s memoir of Amma, her maternal grandmother, is titled Amma’s Daughters. I emphasize the plural “daughter…
London. Francis Boutle. 2018. 392 pages. In 2005 the publisher Francis Boutle embarked on an ambitious series of bilingual anthologies of the Lesser Used Languages of Europe. Recently, the ninth volum…
Mexico City. Almadía. 2018. 408 pages. El vértigo horizontal, by the Mexican writer Juan Villoro, is designed as a cartographic map of the Mexico City subway with different lines and intersec…
Blacksburg, Virginia. Noemi Press. 2018. 96 pages. If you’ve noticed that translated books are enjoying an uptick in popularity, you are not alone. Indeed, the griping about a widespread disregard fo…