An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures and the Limits of Intimacy
Clarice Lispector soothes and excites the reader through variation, inversion, and extension, writing in a manner that is both erotic and illuminating, and difficult to translate.
Laurent Binet’s Alternate History of the Novel
The elaborate counterfactuals of Binet’s newest novel, which contemplates a Spanish conquest in reverse, offer a recursive vision of history: you can swap out the protagonists, but the processes of social atomization and economic consolidation unleashed by globalization will propel us into the modern era regardless.
The Interfaith Poetics of Pilgrim Bell
For readers who share his sensitivity to the spiritual, Kaveh Akbar forges an interfaith poetics based on shared humanity and sharply rendered difference, manifested in an ethics of interruption. We find each other, the collection seems to say, in our shared search for the divine, wounded and harnessing the
The World Will Be Tlön
"I recalled Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ when trying to make sense of my daughter’s intellectual disability as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Like Orbis Tertius, the DSM seemed to me like a product of a secret society gradually working to shape
The Transfer of Power in The Lying Life of Adults
Elena Ferrante often uses objects in her fiction to explore relationships and time, but she also uses them as objective correlatives; while the bracelet in her 2019 novel serves as a way to move the reader through the plot, it is also clearly identified as an object, one that
Late Summer’s Exploration of the Past
From the beginning to the end of the novel, Luiz Ruffato gives us a moment-by-moment account of his protagonist’s activities, thoughts, and feelings—a stream-of-consciousness narrative in which, as the novel progresses, the character’s memories of the past become more and more prominent.
Loneliness and Parasocial Relationships in The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Natsuko Imamura's 2019 novel reads at first glance as a fairly straightforward psychological thriller, with voyeurism is at its center. Imamura, however, also explores a deeper psychological entanglement, stemming from a desire to connect when social interaction feels like an insurmountable barrier.
John Winthrop, Don Quixote, and Donald Trump’s “Fake News”
Far from being un-American, Trump’s deployment of the “illusory truth effect” is supremely so. Indeed, it is in lock step with the shady rhetorical strategies employed by Trump’s Puritan forbearer John Winthrop. Like Trump, Winthrop’s hustle depended upon his followers seeing what they actually couldn’t, and unseeing what was
The Exploration of Memory in Things Remembered and Things Forgotten
While the objectivity of memory—and even its actual substance—is consistently brought into question in Kyoko Nakajima’s stories, what remains clear are the emotions attached to the act of remembering and the way these emotions meaningfully link individuals or objects across time.
The Power of the Cuban Peoples’s Verses
José Martí, Margarita Engle, and the San Isidro Movement have contributed, over the course of a century, to the long tradition of writing about a free Cuba through poetics. The government knows the revolutionary history and power of artists and poets in Cuba, and they fear it.