Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 432 pages.Christophe Andre was working as a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator in Ingushetia, just west of Chechnya, when he was kidnapped and held for 111 d…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. Columbia Global Reports. 2016. 112 pages.WLT readers are attuned to the complexities of what makes a novel global and of the limitations of strictly academic ripostes on the topic.…
London. Seagull Books. 2017. 200 pages.Elfriede Jelinek adopts the narrative structure, setting, and themes of Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women for Charges, a drama that delivers a powerf…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 296 pages.The outline of William Seabrook’s life casts him as a juicy subject for a biography. A published writer, sexually kinky player, adventurous traveler, o…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2016. 1,014 pages.Jean Cocteau was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered in his lifetime: bewitched by exceedingly young males (Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, Ed…
Massachusetts. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016. 419 pages.Anthologies bearing the distinct taste of the anthologists are preferable, in my view, to compilations whose editors…
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2016. 317 pages.Finally, a gathering of essays on Rudolfo Anaya’s now vast archive of writing that considerably widens the circuitry of engagement with global lit…
New Delhi. Aleph. 2017. 244 pages.As with acts of observing the complex structures of trees, it takes a few rounds of intense readerly attention to detect the subtle patterns in Sumana Roy’s exquisite…
San Francisco. Outpost19. 2016. 156 pages.To many, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for knocking on doors and leaving the religious tract The Watchtower in waiting rooms and laundromats. The…
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2017. 336 pages.Mestizos Come Home! is a comprehensive and valuable study of Mexican American history and culture from pre-Columbian and colonial Me…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 327 pages.In the introduction to this collection, editor Marcia Haag displays intimate awareness while skillfully articulating the complexities of Nat…
University of Oklahoma Press. 2017. 185 pages. In 1904 Frédéric Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts to revitalize the langue d’oc through his epic poem Mirèio. N…
Norman, Oklahoma. Mongrel Empire Press. 2017. 180 pages.Maurice Kenny’s final collection, a lyric jaunt through history and memoir, serves as an important bookend to his creative legacy. Kenny’s signi…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2017. 177 pages.Peek into the kaleidoscope spin of one family’s sense of identity. Denise Low’s The Turtle’s Beating Heart invites you to watch as she l…
Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 288 pages.When Sophie Chauveau’s cousin Béatrice Meyer gets in touch with her after many years, it should be a cause for celebration. Instead, that meeting results in a very di…
Berkeley, California. Stone Bridge Press. 2016. 914 pages. This is a big book. Massive. Shockingly so. In fact, when you first pick it up there is little you can do other than marvel at the…
New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2016. 386 pages.India’s socioeconomic gap is not so much widening as deepening, in the sense that the haves (the ebullient middle and upper class) are becoming increasingly “glo…
Stockholm. Natur & Kultur. 2016. 296 pages.This fascinating, episodic study of the year 1947 is a microhistory of events, often meaningful for social rather than political reasons, that includes c…
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2016. 481 pages.The story of Wallace Stevens’s life is one of the most paradoxical in the chronicles of modern poets. His poems are among the most elegant, rhythmically…
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…
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…