A Conversation with C Pam Zhang by Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada Rarely is a debut novel received with as much anticipation and praise as C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Set in the aftermath of the California gold rush, the land ravaged and depleted of gold, the novel follows siblings Lucy, twelve, and Sam, eleven, who are left… Read more →
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming By Laszlo Krasznahorkai Translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions Publishing, 2019 Review by JE Suarez Open the first page of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and you will see a passage titled “WARNING.” Some seven pages long and positioned before the book’s title page, before the table of contents, before, even, the copyright page, this prologue (if… Read more →
Review: Lynn Martin’s Shiver by Lindsay Hill …where not a mile down the road runs a river—clear and clean called ‘Rockfish.’ Or, simply, the river. Or even more simply, home. In his introduction to Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, translator Sam Hamill shares a telling anecdote from the poet’s life. When one of Basho’s acolytes lavishly… Read more →
Deni Ellis Béchard’s sixth book and third novel White is a high-res contemporary replica of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Part investigative journalism, part travel journal, White is captained by an American-Canadian journalist, Béchard (eponymously named), as he travels into the Congolese jungle to profile a mysterious, rogue conservationist. As he descends into the Congo’s dense briar of politicians and… Read more →
At the University of Virginia, I teach an Introduction to Poetry class called “Dream, Death, and Myth.” While organizing the myth unit, I was met with a super-abundance of poems about Classical and Judeo-Christian mythology. Even among contemporary authors, there were so many great books to choose from, like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Louise Glück’s Averno, and Gregory Orr’s… Read more →
In Sophie Collins’ Who is Mary Sue? (Faber 2018), the interrogative provides backdrop to the deep problems of privilege, identity, gender, and Collins shapes her collection to surprise as much as shock us awake. And she not only makes the world we already know new through poetic image, but returns us to the ignored, truncated, and occluded voices and persons… Read more →
Max Ritvo’s second and final collection of poems, The Final Voicemails, has been published posthumously by Milkweed, two years after his death from Ewing’s sarcoma on August 23, 2016. Ritvo asked Louise Glück to select the best poems of what remained, both from earlier work and poems written toward the end of his life, a time of which Glück notes… Read more →
Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm is a rare prophetic glimpse into a future haunted by the now. An alchemist of language, Wahmanholm’s first full-length book since her award-winning chapbook, Night Vision, is a revelry far beyond what I believed imagination could conjure. She gives us a complete stranger of a world, a planet ruled by its own profound logic of consistency… Read more →
The incomprehensible evil of the early twentieth century’s fascist regimes has made it easy to fall into a trap of thinking—one which governments that send their peoples to war would like for us to fall into—that conflict could conceivably be reduced to a struggle between good and bad. We should be wary of narratives that seek to make us forget… Read more →
In 1891, in an essay entitled “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde wrote these words: “‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.” Alas, the “new world” Wilde dreamed of is yet to appear. More than a century later, we’re still trying to… Read more →
