New York. Crown. 2020. 585 pages.
AFTER READING this study and skimming the end sections, I stand in awe: what one man can research, consolidate, and narrate in prose that reads…
MISCELLANEOUS
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
New York. Grove Press. 2020. 209 pages. YAN LIANKE'S Three Brothers: Memories of My Family is a powerful portrait of the trials of daily life in Song County, Henan Prov…
London. Honford Star. 2020. 182 pages. WHAT IS LOCAL IDENTITY? What have we lost in the name of development? How do we best pass on traditional culture to…
London. Flipped Eye. 2019. 188 pages. THE IDIOSYNCRASY OF my own origin story made me particularly fascinated by Un Nuevo Sol, a collection of works by British Latinx w…
New York. Doubleday. 2019. 431 pages. Gods of the Upper Air tells the story of Franz Boas, an outspoken critic of white supremacists, and his profound influence on three students—Marga…
London. Verso. 2019. 330 pages. Add Vigdis Hjorth to the growing list of writers of significant autofiction, reality literature whose characters depend on recognizable people and actual situati…
Portland. Tin House Books. 2020. 203 pages. “Dear Eun Ji. Hello, hello, hello, my Eun Ji.” E. J. Koh’s memoir begins with a letter from her mother, its diction informal and lighthearted, its de…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2020. 269 pages. Considered one of Spain’s most acclaimed novelists, Javier Cercas knows how easily men lie to themselves in order to give themselves sufficient leeway to d…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 80 pages. It is no coincidence that this narrative exercise is published after César Aira’s participation at MoMA’s 2017 editorial project The Valise, a colle…
New York. Graywolf Press. 2019. 247 pages. “Writing is a way to get rid of shame,” says Karl Ove Knausgaard, reflecting on why he wrote his celebrated 3,600-plus-page-long multivolume memoir, My…
New York. Other Press. 2020. 421 pages. A lifetime—seventy-five years—has passed since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and other hellholes emblematic of the European exterminatio…
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I Incidental Inventions. New York. Europa Editions. 2019. 117 pages. Elena Ferrante’s Key Words. New York. Europa Editions. 2019. 308 pages. IN OCTOBER…
New York. Little, Brown Spark. 2019. 520 pages. In a time when we stand more divided than we have in decades and global leaders treat international relations as zero-sum games, it is necessary to be…
Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2019. 266 pages. The best aspect of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers is its intrinsic anthological quality…
Belmont, North Carolina. Wiseblood Books. 2019. 213 pages. Dana Gioia is unique in contemporary poetry, as his poetry and critical commentary confirm. Rather than rise through the ranks of “academic…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2019. 480 pages. An oral history in comics form, Grass tells the story of Korean national Lee Ok-Sun, who, at the age of fifteen, was abducted into sexual sl…
New York. New York Review Books. 2019. 135 pages. Beginning with the burial of a father’s lung, Marion Fayolle crafts a remarkable allegorical journey of family, illness, and loss in this idios…
New York. Dey Street Books. 2019. 382 pages. Isha Sesay’s Beneath the Tamarind Tree is a grave-toned paean to the fortitude of the roughly 276 Nigerian schoolgirls from Chibok who were…
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 i…
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, real…
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 fro…
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 w…
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 publish…
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 Smo…
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 cele…