Katia D. Ulysse Akashic Books ($15.95) by Julia Stein Katia D. Ulysse’s powerful first novel Mouths Don’t Speak explores suffering, both physical and emotional, and one woman’s search for closure. The Haitian protagonist Jacqueline lives in Baltimore and struggles with deep psychological wounds inflicted by her mother, who still lives in Port-au-Prince. The novel challenges […]
Ahmed Saadawi Translated by Jonathan Wright Penguin Books ($16) by Matthew M. Pincus Ahmed Saadawi’s new horror novel has the simple but timely premise of retelling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of Baghdad during the Iraq War. Hadi, a junk dealer who lives in a dilapidated building in the historic district of town, brings […]
Mark SaFranko Murder Slim Press ($12) by Zack Kopp The title of Mark SaFranko’s new installment of his fictional alter-ego Max Zajack’s biography comes from a snippet of Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s Victoria: “all love’s ways are strewn with blossoms and blood.” SaFranko’s style is a distillation of that founded by Hamsun in the late […]
Chris Ware Rizzoli ($60) by Steve Matuszak For all its sophistication, cartoonist Chris Ware’s body of work, as Ware relates in his recent, hefty book Monograph, has a humble origin: listening to his grandmother tell stories of her past. According to Ware, she did so “with a vibrancy of detail, a firm feeling of reality […]
Tillie Walden First Second ($18) by Stephanie Burt Spinning presents itself, accurately enough, as a familiar kind of graphic novel, or graphic memoir, or whatever it is the kids these days call book-length comics about the author’s youth (like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or David Small’s Stitches) written primarily with adult readers in mind. Tillie […]
interviewed by Allan Vorda, with Nina Shanu and Jennifer Otalor A writer with both a Scottish and Sierra Leonean background, Aminatta Forna was born in 1964 in Scotland near Glasgow, where her father Mohamed Forna was working on a medical internship. After her parents’ divorce, Aminatta moved with her father back to Sierra Leone, where […]
A Hagiography of Heaven and Vicinity Michael Joyce Broadstone Books Joyride to Jupiter Nuala O’Connor New Island Books Colours Other Than Blue Anthony Glavin Ward River Press Ferenji and Other Stories Helena Mulkerns Doire Press by M. G. Stephens Michael Joyce is often referred to as the father or grandfather of hyper-fiction, and is an […]
Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press ($25) by Sean Nam In the penultimate chapter to Dave Hickey’s new collection of essays, Perfect Wave, the typically unflappable art critic describes a moment of sobering vulnerability. Hickey is at a black-tie dinner during one of the more prominent art fairs in the world, engaging the cognoscenti with […]
Marcel Proust Translated by Lydia Davis New Directions ($19.95) by David Wiley Marcel Proust, author of the world’s longest and perhaps greatest novel, In Search of Lost Time, was a near-invalid who sequestered himself during most of his masterwork’s composition inside a cork-lined, shuttered bedroom, banishing pollen, noise, sunlight, people, and everything else in the […]
Brandon Harris Amistad ($15.99) by Joseph Houlihan Brandon Harris’s Making Rent in Bed-Stuy: A Memoir of Trying to Make it in New York City is symphonic in scope and expression. The memoir, presented in connected film and cultural writings, tells the story of the ambitions and frustrations of a young filmmaker in the decade after […]