Author Archive
Searching for Answers in the Enormous
More difficulties mount in consideration of how commodified the Sistine Chapel’s most iconic images have been made; how can a viewer be struck with awe before an image that’s been made into mugs, mouse pads, magnets, and memes?
Discovery and Re-Discovery in Endpapers
Jennifer Savran Kelly’s new novel, centered on a genderqueer bookbinder living in New York in 2003, is a story of intimate discoveries.
A Line in the World’s Imaginings
In Dorthe Nors’s imagined passages, truth emerges overtly. These imaginings create an embodied landscape lush with life, reverberating with echoes of voices, human and otherwise.
The Interplay of the Collective and the Individual in We Ride Upon Sticks
Quan Barry’s collective narration creates the semblance of a unified whole that is also prescient in its selective individuation: while dipping into single characters’ arcs to develop them as individual people, this separation and isolation prepares the reader to meet and accept the novel’s ending.
Curing Season: Artifacts’ Exploration of Form
Kristine Langley Mahler’s agile adoption of various forms, each with its own visual and verbal rhetoric of meaning-making that clarifies, identifies, and amplifies the displayed experience, creates a multitude of anchoring points across a collection of detail-rich essays.
Natural History’s Echoes
Andrea Barrett’s new book is a collection of echoes—names and references that have become familiar across the years to Barrett’s readers, filtering through her collections and novels. The effect is at once familiar and fresh, like being reminded of something half-forgotten and all the more treasured in the recollection.
Isolation and The Wild Hunt
Emma Seckel wields multiple strategies of constraint to expand her novel’s speculative possibilities and, most importantly, establish a thoroughly compelling set of character relationships that infuse the supernatural stakes with organic urgency.
The Gap Between Knowing and Understanding in On Bullfighting
A.L. Kennedy’s layered exploration of the corrida de toros is a revelation of knowing the problem and not understanding what must come next.
Spear’s Exploration of the Power of Understanding
Nicola Griffith’s new novel, which retells the story of Percival, portrays an act of resistance within the sphere of Arthurian mythology itself, a way to remake that space and liberate it for a larger and more inclusive community—and it is an act of resistance that moves beyond the pages
Authority and Trust
In Hernan Diaz’s new book, narrative distance and style are wielded as signifiers of truth; as the novel progresses, the differing narrative strategies of each section create a progression of collapsing narrative distance that brings the reader closer—one feels—to the version of the story they can trust.
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