London. Hurst. 2020. 367 pages.
As events unfold in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, whether related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the war in Syria, or to Trump’s so-called deal o…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. Grove Press. 2021. 272 pages. FLIGHT, MOVEMENT FROM place to place, past to present, border-crossings real and philosophical are central to award-winning Sierra Leonean nov…
Oxford. Oxford University Press. 2020. 380 pages. IN HER INTRODUCTION to The Best American Essays 1992, Susan Sontag writes: “The culture administered by universities h…
Chennai, India. Westland. 2020. 144 pages. MUCH OF INDIA’S LITERARY and cinematic worlds are geared up to celebrate with considerable enthusiasm the birth centenary of Sahir Ludhianv…
Athens. University of Georgia Press. 2020. 185 pages. THE MOTIF OF DANCING is central to Sejal Shah’s memorable collection of essays about growing up “Indian outside of India, in non…
New Haven. Yale University Press. 2020. 302 pages. “THE MISERY OF VENICE stands there for all the world to see,” Henry James wrote in Italian Hours, “a thoroughgoing de…
Philadelphia. Paul Dry Books. 2021. 184 pages. AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS, this book of memoirs recounts the author’s interactions with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Fitzgerald, and John Cheev…
Caption Bautzen, Germany. Domowina-Verlag. 2020. 191 pages. IN 2003, THE VILLAGE CHURCH in Horno/Rogow, Germany, was “beheaded.” The steeple of its church was cut off, emptied of…
Brooklyn. Ugly Duckling Presse. 2020. 45 pages. WE MAY THINK OF THE pamphlet as an obsolete genre and format, the kind libraries and archives collect and educated readers associate w…
Montreal. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2020. 511 pages. THE MONOLITH OF American history often overshadows the continent’s early multiculturalism. This is especially true of the…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 500 pages. THE LITERATURE OF MEMORY often explores what consciousness is stored in and speaks from objects. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu…
London. Granta. 2020. 352 pages. FRANCES LARSON IS AN anthropologist at the University of Durham and the author of three books on anthropologists, collectors of artifacts, and behead…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2021. 350 pages. IN HIS NEW COLLECTION of essays, In the Land of the Cyclops, Karl Ove Knausgaard continues to use writing as…
New York. Knopf. 2020. 1152 pages. OVER THE YEARS I’VE approached each new biography of Sylvia Plath hoping for a fully comprehensive account of her life that would portray her as th…
Miami. Alfaguara. 2020. 108 pages. MEDIO SIGLO CON BORGES is a compilation of interviews, essays, and reviews written by Mario Vargas Llosa about Jorge Luis Borges over five…
New York. New York Review Books. 2021. 253 pages. IF FICTION IS “CREATED,” then nonfiction is surely “found.” Criticism is a hunt for flaws and virtues, history spotted in the wind-m…
New York. Penguin Press. 2021. 304 pages. THIS WORK IS A wonderful addition to the recent scholarship that reevaluates the role of the Black Church in the development of African Amer…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2020. 384 pages. BEHIND EVERY GREAT novel there seems to be a great creation story: William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in eight weeks…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2020. 415 pages. FOWZIA KARIMI’S Above Us the Milky Way is a complex mix of memory and fiction, telling the story of the dead, the living, a…
New York. Viking. 2020. 304 pages. “MY AMERICAN LIFE started with loss.” With that sentence, Lan Cao opens this memoir told in alternating narratives with her daughter, Harlan…
London. Chelsea Green. 2020. 208 pages. READERS OF NATURALIST nonfiction will feel at home in Derek Gow’s Bringing Back the Beaver. They will find familiar elements: narrati…
Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. 2020. 128 pages. THIS UNIQUE BOOK by memoirist and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn traces with deep learning and imagination the relation…
Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2021. 200 pages. ON A NIGHT WHEN icy winds blew south off Lake Erie and shook the windows of Kazim Ali’s house in Oberlin, he remembered the Canadian…
New York. Metropolitan Books. 2020. 264 pages. WITH JOE SACCO having garnered fame for reporting from war-torn locales of the Gaza Strip, the Balkans, and the Russian Caucasus, a boo…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2020. 450 pages. AS IN HIS STUDY of the ancient Vedics, Ardor, in The Celestial Hunter the Italian philologist and publisher…