by Allan Vorda and Liliana Avila Samanta Schweblin was born in Argentina in 1978. In 2001 Schweblin published her first book, The Nucleus of Disturbances; this was followed by Birds in the Mouth (2009), Rescue Distance (2014), and a collection of stories called Seven Empty Houses (2015). All of her books were originally published in […]
Ahmet Altan Translated by Alexander Dawe Europa Editions ($18) by Garry Craig Powell Turkish writer Ahmet Altan has been in prison for over a year, accused in President Erdogan’s crackdown on the media of “sending subliminal messages” to encourage the planners of last year’s failed coup. Endgame, his first novel available in English, is a […]
Edited by Daniel F. Herrmann Whitechapel Gallery ($50) by M. Kasper Since his death in 2005, Eduardo Paolozzi’s reputation as one of postwar Britain’s most versatile, productive, and celebrated visual artists has been further burnished by a stream of specialized publications and posthumous art exhibits. Of the former, mention should be made of the brilliant […]
Sara Uribe Translated by John Pluecker Les Figues Press ($17) by Gabrielle Civil At a time when the discourse of “bad hombres” and “building a wall” has poisoned U.S. society, Mexican writer Sara Uribe’s Antígona González emerges as an anti-toxin and prescription. A brilliant meditation on the wages of violence in contemporary Mexican society, the […]
Mai Der Vang Graywolf Press ($16) by John Bradley “Make me the monarch / morphed from suffering” states a section title of Mai Der Vang’s debut book of poetry, Afterland. She’s referring to the suffering of the Hmong due to the Vietnam war, or more specifically the “secret war” in Laos, where many Hmong lived. […]
Interviewed by Jorge Armenteros Elvira Navarro, born in Huelva, published her first book, La ciudad en invierno, in 2007. In 2009 she published La ciudad feliz, which won the Jaén Prize for best novel and the Tormenta Prize for best new author, and was published as The Happy City in an English translation by Rosalind […]
Chinese Poetic Writing Francois Cheng Translated by Donald Riggs and Jerome Seaton New York Review Books ($19.95) A Little Primer of Tu Fu David Hawkes New York Review Books ($16.95) by Patrick James Dunagan Chinese poetry first hit home for me with poet Joel Oppenheimer’s recounting of the mythic tale regarding poet Li Po’s (701-762) […]
Martin Herbert Sternberg Press ($24) by Michael Workman It's not difficult to conceive of the classist, sexist, and racist machinations of the international art world responsible for "art's transmogrification into a backcloth for the power plays of the prosperous," so readers of Tell Them I Said No might expect to find an indictment of those […]
Brontez Purnell Feminist Press / Amethyst Editions ($17.95) by Greg Baldino For as long as there have been small towns and big cities, men and women of a queer inclination have made whatever excuses they could to move from the former to the latter in pursuit of who they knew themselves to be and who […]
Nandini Dhar Agape Editions ($16) by D.M. Aderibigbe Nandini Dhar’s Historians of Redundant Moments has originality as its primary ingredient. The poems in this novel-in-verse will almost lead you to believe that the author exists in a world several silences away from the rest of the literary blocs. Take this line for example: “In Ghost […]