(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2015) At some point while reading Eric Pankey’s Crow-Work, I set the book down and Google’d “Who invented time?” I am embarrassed to admit it. A foolish question, I know, and not one that I expected … Continued
Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait (New York, NY: Overlook Press, 2011) Miracles abound in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s new novel, Daniel Stein, Interpreter. Early on, Daniel Stein—a young Polish priest who has been forced to become a translator for the … Continued
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015) How do we survive in a world so hollowed out that it occasionally devours its own? Makina, the protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s borderlands novel, Signs Preceding the End … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014) “I know that my name will resound in the ears of my loved ones as perfectly as a picture. And I also know that sometimes it will cease to Be a name And will be … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014) To be lost, forgotten, rejected. In a word: failure. There are precious few words in the English language that strike so hard, or cut so deep, bereft of nicety or preamble. No matter how one … Continued
(New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) In his introduction to the advance reader copy of Sam Lipsyte’s new novel The Ask, Lipsyte’s editor offers the opinion that the comic novel is currently out of favor. I would argue … Continued
Translated from the Romanian by Michael Henry Heim (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015) The narrator of Max Blecher’s semi-autobiographical novel, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, is a tree. Understandably, he is desperate for his love interest, Edda, to understand. It … Continued
Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) Last November, my introduction to Diana’s Tree was similar to that awe one feels when meeting an exceptional human being—I was rendered speechless. After my first read through … Continued
Eileen Myles is not a woman poet. She is not a rockstar. She is not a badass. She is not a Catholic. She is not a politician. Eileen Myles is not a New Yorker. She is not a nature poet. … Continued
(New York, NY: Black Balloon Publishing, 2014) Butterflies. That’s what they call that feeling of dread you experience deep down in the pit of your stomach before doing something that scares you, or after you’ve done something wrong. Tiny little explosions … Continued
(Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2014) Over the last several months, it seems, the internet has been exploding with issues about women’s health and well-being, issues of inequality, issues of gendered violence. There was a month in the summer when … Continued
(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2014) The poems in Sara Eliza Johnson’s Bone Map are unmistakably kindred with one another; though neither formally unified nor linear in any discernible way, each one seems to resonate with the next. Driven by a … Continued
(Fredonia, NY: Leapfrog Press, 2014) The characters in David Armstrong’s story collection “Going Anywhere” live in the darkness on the edge of town. Fractured by loss—aimless infidelities, deflated ambition, damaged or absent children—they limp through landscapes rural but not pastoral, … Continued
(Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2014) Before I understood what it meant to be in love, I was afraid of sex. At school, I learned sex before marriage meant risking pregnancy or catching a disease. At home, there was the … Continued
Translated from the Afrikaans by the author (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015) First signs include sudden onset of fever, fatigue and muscle pain, a sore throat that can be easily confused with the flu. The virus, not living itself … Continued
(Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012) As a writer, I create yearlong, but because of my position as an instructor of English composition, summer remains my season of “play,” three months when I treat writing like a full-time job. The giddiness … Continued
Translated from the Afrikaans by J.M. Coetzee (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2014) Being a free and independent woman for the first time in her life, the narrator of Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is eager to collect … Continued
(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2014) Writers are often recommended to chronicle their dreams. Once recorded, one is expected to find the consequences within the strange images, the symbolism, the wild transformations. I could never capture them. My nightmares were never … Continued
Translated from the German by Sheila Dickie (New York, NY: New Vessel Press, 2014) Taguchi Hiro is sitting across from an older businessman who wears a necktie, a “salaryman” as they say in Japan. They are strangers who find themselves at the … Continued
(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2014) “Sun’s yoke a greasy sputter in morning’s blue Teflon.” Lee Ann Roripaugh opens her poem “Trompe l’Oeil: The Annotated Version” with these words, which I read as I sit at a diner down the road, … Continued