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-mi…
MISCELLANEOUS
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 Ameri…
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, and the…
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 Margar…
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: narrativ…
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 b…
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 w…
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 book…
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 R…
New York. Open Letter. 2020. 234 pages. QUITE SIMPLY, IT IS DIFFICULT to decide where to begin with Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Age of Skin since there’s not one, but a multitude…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milkweed Editions. 2020. 184 pages. AIMEE NEZHUKUMATAHIL'S World of Wonders takes a poetic-encyclopedic approach to memoir. The book is as much about…
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Voices of a Massacre: Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988. Ed. Nasser Mohajer. London. Oneworld. 2020. 480 pages. Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow. Toronto. Trace.…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2019. 292 pages. EACH OF THE TEN ESSAYS in this splendid, exhaustively researched, and timely collection—buoyed by the editors’ equally comprehensive introductio…
London. Pushkin Press. 2020. 352 pages. HARDLY A LITERARY POSITION exists that trumps that of the exile and the émigré. Of course, not every exile succeeds in fashioning from their ba…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2020. 340 pages. JON FOSSE is a well-known and revered multiple award-winning writer in his native Norway. He has published for more than twenty ye…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 212 pages. JENNY ERPENBECK’S fictional worlds offer us glimpses of what exists below the surface—of land, of water, of consciousness. In her novel …
New York. Columbia University Press. 2020. 277 pages. HOW APPROPRIATE THAT ONE of the most incisive studies of Elena Ferrante to date has been the outcome of an experiment in criticis…
Eugene, Oregon. Resource Publications. 2020. 270 pages. GLANCING AT ITS TABLE of contents and finding subjects ranging from C. S. Lewis to Morrissey to the Arab Spring, it might appea…
New York. And Other Stories. 2020. 120 pages. I’D READ TWO NOVELS written by Yuri Herrera before A Silent Fury. They were both masterpieces of brevity. The restraint and insi…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milkweeed Editions. 2020. 205 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED BY Doubleday Canada in 2002, For Joshua’s posthumous release as the first US edition of the late,…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2020. 416 pages. EURASIA'S MOST TUMULTUOUS chapters are preserved in the waters of two prehistoric lakes. In 2017 Kapka Kassabova’s Border…
New York. HarperCollins. 2020. 328 pages. “IMAGINE THIS: the author Fang Fang did not exist in today’s Wuhan. . . . What would we have heard? What would we have seen?” asked writer Ya…
Abingdon, UK. Routledge. 2019. 293 pages. BEYOND EAST AND WEST: A Story of Civilization through the Great Epics, by Suchethana Swaroop, is an attempt to shed light o…
London. Faber & Faber. 2019. 239 pages. “WHAT IS NORMAL tea?” Henrietta Lovell, the founder of the Rare Tea Company, wants you to reflect on this question. Hers is a white silver…