I’m honestly not sure where to start with Jordan Stump’s recent English translation of French writer Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In, because it feels like I’ve been preparing to read this book for a long time, a long time before I knew of its existence and perhaps even before it was published in its original … More Haunted Hemming & Hawing: My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye
You can judge a book by its cover, to an extent. You can also, maybe to an even greater extent, judge a book by its title. Debut novelist Ava Farmehri borrows this one from Dante, and subsequently presents a work that lives up to its impact. Sheyda Porrouya, a twenty-year-old Iranian born at the time … More Through the Sad Wood Our Corpses Will Hang by Ava Farmehri
Kafka’s Metamorphosis has in part occupied such a terrifying place in the modern imagination because Gregor Samsa’s awakening in the body of a “monstrous insect” involves the change of both his appearance and perceived usefulness. The idea that a person could simply wake up one day, look different, be considered less relevant to society and therefore … More Get (Sucked) In: The Hole by Hye-young Pyun
Francophone Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses, out this year in an English translation by Helen Stevenson, is the story of a man whose full name in the Lingala language means “Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors.” Moses also frequently goes by “Little Pepper,” having earned the moniker … More Alain Mabanckou’s Piquant Picaresque: Black Moses
Exploring the lives of unpleasant people in fiction always carries risks. Awfulness for its own sake or to hammer home a point, no matter how skillfully rendered, can easily grow tedious. Mere jabs at capitalism, materialism and the like will grate on the nerves of the intelligent reader the fifth or sixth time around. Nature … More Smothering Heights: Nature and Necessity by Tariq Goddard
What I love about Mary Gaitskill is that she somehow managed to never be corrupted by, I mean, learn, the writer’s code of conduct. There are many things you’re not supposed to do, as a writer. For one, you’re not supposed to write a long personal essay about the grief you suffered over a runaway … More Tap, Tap, Tap: Somebody with a Little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill
If I say, “This book, the chapters of which are separated by descriptions of painter’s pigments, alternates between the point of view of the main character, Yuki—who grew up with Japanese parents in New York, made friends with a future model in high school and went on herself to become an artist and move to … More Girls & Monsters: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You
So. There’s already been quite a to-do surrounding Michiko Kakutani’s so-called thinly-veiled attack on Trump in her recent New York Times review of historian Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939. While her review definitely gives a nod to the significance of Ullrich’s work and delves quite thoroughly into parts of it, her examination of the book comes … More What Does Kakutani’s Hitler-Trump Buzz Say About Book Reviews in General?
LIT ALL OVER 