Seattle. Fantagraphics. 2023. 184 pages.
Graphic biographies are a fairly new phenomenon, and the genre definitely has legs. Graphic form can constrain the narrative via the conventio…
MISCELLANEOUS
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2023. 259 pages. As journal-style prose, Out of the Sugar Factory draws on both history and literature to capture the world’s present and past fixation…
Dallas. BenBella Books. 2022. 320 pages. A good amount of caution is advised when approaching any work that claims to present a “theory of everything,” which “bridge[s] the gap between the quantum and…
Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2022. 501 pages. It would be easy for readers to feel daunted by the scale of this volume. Totaling over a quarter-of-a-million words, with thirty-five contribut…
New York. Pantheon. 2022. 394 pages. Ever since Art Spiegelman’s Maus first appeared—part 1 in 1986, part 2 in 1991—critics and readers have been arguing about it. The starting point for these discuss…
London. Alma Books. 2022. 358 pages. Is there anything authentically new to add to the already well-known story of the Romantic poet John Keats’s heartbreaking final days? Alessandro Gallenzi thought…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2023. 400 pages. Elixir is the latest example of Kapka Kassabova’s knack for sensory and poignant nonfiction. Her previous books, Border and To the Lake, were two unforget…
Minneapolis. University of Minneapolis Press. 2022. 292 pages. The truth hurts. Or as James Baldwin, patron saint of twentieth-century American literature and David Mura’s book, more insightfully puts…
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 215 pages. Sarah E. L. Bowskill’s succinct study deals properly with the “never-ending network” discussed in her eighth and last chapter, which is ultimately the a…
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Cambridge Scholars. 2022. 131 pages. In this monograph, Roberto Cantú critically revisits José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho some sixty years after its publication and scru…
Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2022. 474 pages. Stephen D. Miller has assembled an engaging collection of fourteen short stories, numerous poems in varied forms, and two essays spanning th…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2022. 452 pages. Extensively researched and written with clear respect and affection for its subject, Fatima Bremmer’s biography of Sweden’s first investigative journalist de…
Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Press. 2022. 176 pages. Mathematics has been feared by many and loved by some for its rigor, symbolism, and brevity. Literature on mathematics abounds with technical, bi…
White River Junction, Vermont. Chelsea Green. 2023. 224 pages. With an unwieldy subtitle for a somewhat unwieldy book, At Work in the Ruins is largely a continuation or an updating of an essay Dougald…
Munich. Penguin Verlag. 2022. 185 pages. I eagerly awaited the new book by German writer Gregor Sander, released in spring 2022, because his clear yet multivalent writing has always left me wanting mo…
New York. PEN America. 2022 (©2021). 417 pages. IN KEN BURNS’S 2001 DOCUMENTARY series Jazz, saxophonist Branford Marsalis says, “The blues are about freedom. You know, there…
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2023. 289 pages. SINCE THIS REVIEW is written by an essayist, rather than a literary critic or theorist, I should perhaps begin by sharing the w…
Madeira Park, British Columbia. Douglas & McIntyre. 2022. 184 pages. COMBINING PERSONAL MEMOIR with cultural history, Kinauvit? reflects Norma Dunning’s experience constr…
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 268 pages. AFRICAN LITERATURES as World Literature is in the Literatures as World Literature series, described as “a novel appro…
New York. PEN America. 2022 (©2021). 417 pages. IN KEN BURNS’S 2001 DOCUMENTARY series Jazz, saxophonist Branford Marsalis says, “The blues are about freedom. You know, there…
Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2022. 184 pages. IT IS MY SEMI-PROFESSIONAL opinion that anybody reviewing a book of essays must wrestle with the question, “Who on earth buy…
New York. Scribner. 2022. 208 pages. FEN, BOG AND SWAMP, by Annie Proulx, is the much-anticipated follow-up to her last work, Barkskins, where Proulx, well known for…
Toronto. House of Anansi. 2022. 200 pages. WRITERS AND THINKERS have presented Canada’s Massey Lectures since 1961, published to accompany CBC broadcasts; Tomson Highway delivers thi…
New York. Amistad. 2022. 368 pages. SHORTLY AFTER THE publication of Miss Chloe, a graduate student sent me an unsolicited text message exclaiming, “So far I am 21 pages int…
New York. Other Press. 2023. 432 pages. PUBLISHED IN FRANCE in 1999, Nicolas Delalande’s Struggle and Mutual Aid is a mainly Eurocentric study of the International Workingmen…