Amir Or translated by Seth Michelson Sagging Meniscus ($22) by Kenneth J. Pruitt Reading poetry in translation always puts one in the position of wondering what one is missing. The nuances of cadence, the resonances of sound, and, most obviously, the subtleties of meaning all risk being sacrificed at the altar of wider readership beyond […]
Henri Michaux Translated by Richard Sieburth New York Review Books ($16) by M. Kasper Like his comic book compatriot Tintin, the writer and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) grew up in Belgium, traveled the world, and finally settled in France. In 1930, when he’d already published an experimental memoir and an unconventional account of a […]
Robert Jay Lifton The New Press ($22.95) by Robert Zaller Robert Jay Lifton set out long ago to be our catastrophist: the chronicler of the grim age of the twentieth century that included the two most terrible wars in history, and, with the advent of the atomic bomb, of a climate of terror that promises […]
Roberto Calasso translated by Richard Dixon Farrar, Strauss and Giroux ($20) by M. Lock Swingen In conferences and symposiums, Roberto Calasso, one of the preeminent men of letters living and working in Italy today, can sometimes be heard to describe the tradition of literature as a kind of living creature, a veritable “serpent of books” […]
Katie Williams Riverhead Books ($25) by Greg Chase Set in the year 2035, Katie Williams’s Tell the Machine Goodnight envisions a dystopian future, though it’s one that largely resembles our own dystopian present. People clamor to make physical contact with celebrities and offer thousands of dollars for their stray eyelashes or strands of hair. Handheld […]
Leslie Pietrzyk Unnamed Press ($17.99) by Mary Lannon Set in the 1980s in Chicago during the Tylenol murders, Leslie Pietrzyk’s emotionally resonant and timely Silver Girl tells the story of a fraught relationship between an unnamed working-class narrator and her best friend, the upper class Jess who has recently broken off an engagement. Each girl […]
by Eric Lorberer Earlier this year, Craig Thompson’s 2004 book Carnet de Voyage, originally published by Top Shelf Productions, was reissued by Drawn & Quarterly in an expanded hardcover edition. Thompson, an internationally celebrated cartoonist, is the author of books such as Good-bye, Chunky Rice, Blankets, Habibi, and Space Dumplins, but Carnet de Voyage is […]
Nick Drnaso Drawn & Quarterly ($27.95) by Steve Matuszak From time to time, the deep-seated feeling that nothing is really as it seems grabs hold of us, the world as we know it threatened with erasure as we buckle beneath the weight of our doubts. Sometimes the feeling is triggered by events outside of us; […]
Gloria Fisk Columbia University Press ($60) by Erik Noonan In Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, Gloria Fisk offers a case study of the oeuvre and persona of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Because he is a representative figure with general applications to the profession of creative writing in a global context, she uses […]
Claudio Magris Translated by Anne Milano Appel Yale University Press ($25) by John Toren Writing in Italian but steeped in the literature and cultures of Mitteleuropa, Claudio Magris remains a "writer's writer" rather than a popular one, and Journeying will do little to alter the fact. That's too bad. These occasional pieces display the erudition […]