Ema, The Captive by César Aira
★★☆☆☆ The prolific César Aira is a writer of momentum and continuum. He often discusses his work ethic in essays and interviews, explaining how he’s a daily writer and resists editing yesterday’s material. He...
Category: Book Reviews
The Murderous History of Bible Translations by Harry Freedman
★★★★★ It is highly likely that more people have been persecuted or killed in the name of religion than in all the wars in history. The Murderous History of Bible Translations examines one particular...
The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei
★★★☆☆ This short novella about music, family, and business in contemporary China is an alluring introduction to Ge Fei, a novelist of subtle peculiarity and intrigue. The narrator of The Invisibilty Cloak is an...
Sequential Drawings by Richard McGuire
★★★☆☆ You’ve probably seen “spot illustratings” before but not known what to call them. They’re the “unsung toiler of the magazine page,” illustrations tucked into margins and quietly placed after an article’s paragraphs in...
Last Look by Charles Burns
★★★★★ Wickedly unsettling and alluring, Charles Burns’s graphic novel Last Look was originally published in three separate hardcover volumes between 2010 and 2014: X’ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull. Typically, omnibus editions are...
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
★★★★☆ When politicians invoke the “threat of radical Islam,” this typically features imagery of automatic weapons, plane crashes, and IEDs. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission suggests an alternate, perhaps more powerful arsenal: textbooks and bank...
Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Elaine Scarry
★★★★☆ As I began to read this, my concern quickly grew that I was reading another far-fetched identification of the young man who complements the “Dark Lady” of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. My reservations were...
Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet by Edward Wilson-Lee
★★★★☆ Shakespeare in Swahililand is a valuable addition to one’s Shakespeare collection, for it reveals in a delightful and insightful manner the global reach of Shakespeare’s work. Like the worlds Shakespeare created, “Swahililand” does...
Float by Anne Carson
★★★★★ Let’s consider floating a transitional state, stuck between flying and falling. It’s the top of an arc, a beautiful moment of momentary weightlessness before crashing back to earth. Mathematically speaking, there’s a brief...
