Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. 211 pages.In an era when grabbing a woman against her will is still not universally condemned, Una’s book is clearly necessary. This is not to say that necessity m…
MISCELLANEOUS
London. Pushkin Press. 235 pages. “A terrible despondency weighs on everything and everyone. The radio churns out news reports all day long. . . . God help our poor planet in the grip of this mad…
Gurgaon, India. Penguin Books India. 2016. 284 pages.What ensues when a prolific writer often known for his literary fiction points to an aporia that has been prominent in literary studies for a while…
Toller Fratrum, UK. Little Toller Books. 2016. 326 pages.Arboreal: A Collection of New Woodland Writing focuses on the relationship between people and trees, between societies and forests. Ea…
Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2016. 300 pages.This is a brave book, a valiant and valuable book, that seeks to characterize post-1989 fiction as ekphrastically humanitarian. One…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016. 86 pages.Celebrated novelist, poet, and critic Ben Lerner’s essay (an extended version of his 2015 London Review of Books article) uses “hatred” as…
Crawley, Australia. UWA. 2016. 890 pages.Suzanne Falkiner’s prodigious biography of Randolph Stow is a book long awaited by many; not just the literati of his native Australia but those countless read…
Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2016. 211 pages.This slender but dazzling collection of thirteen essays, some previously published but refurbished, is primarily concerned with fiction and criticism…
San Antonio, Texas. Trinity University Press. 2016. 253 pages.There is a huge arc that links the first incomparable essay (on the atom-bomb crater at Trinity, New Mexico) to the final expansive one ab…
London. Telegram Books. 2016. 247 pages.There is a sort of prophetic air that accompanies much of the titular figure’s speech in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s About My Mother. Though autobiographi…
Vancouver, B.C. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. 272 pages.Marcelino Truong’s newly translated graphic memoir, Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961–63, the first of two volumes, is a story of event…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 384 pages.In 1992 Edizioni e/o published a first novel, L’amore molesto, by an Italian writer who called herself “Elena Ferrante.” Its provocative cover featu…
New York. New York Review Books. 2016. 267 pages.In this memoir-cum-travelogue, Teffi, an immensely popular early-twentieth-century Russian satirist, tells of her chance escape from the throes of revo…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 210 pages.In this lushly illustrated exhibition catalog, Michigan State University Museum curators Marsha MacDowell, Mary Worrall, Lynne Swanson, and colle…
Toller Fratrum, UK. Little Toller Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016 (©2015). 148 pages.For many children in Western culture, the first introduction to mermaids is via Disney’s cheerful cinematic a…
New York. Pantheon Books. 2015. 256 pages.Margo Jefferson, acclaimed journalist and critic, has written a tour de force on the black privileged class. Hers is an artful and complicated memoir that ach…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2016. 304 pages.Despite their constant presence in the news, the countries traversed in this welcome graphic docu/memoir are still as alien to many North American read…
Vienna. Der Konterfei. 2015. 93 pages. Ukranian actor and journalist Olena Chekan died of a brain tumor just as protests calling for a freer and more democratic nation were erupting in 2013. In t…
New York. Oxford University Press. 2016. 215 pages.This excellent study of the catalysts for four writers—Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Ha-ruki Murakami—is fascinating to…
New York. The New Press. 2016. 202 pages.Without so much as a few lines’ hesitation, Alain Mabanckou extinguishes a persistent, haunting myth within The Lights of Pointe-Noire: despite clingi…
New York. New York Review Books. 2016. 188 pages.The memoirs and fiction about Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that were published in the post–Mao People’s Republic (prc) disappointed Peking Unive…
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2015. 391 pages.Debates swirl as to whether and to what extent humans have affected and can affect the climate. Not surprisingly, s…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press. 2016. 120 pages.Where does one begin to speak of the Arab Spring, after all that has been expended in dreams, analysis, and li…
Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2016. 370 pages.One hundred and two Palestinians in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States have contributed essays of about one thousand words ea…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2015. 322 pages.Constantly aware of her semantically loaded and ambitious title, Rebecca L. Walkowitz rightly focuses her epilogue on the mutability of “translated…