Tag Archives: Summer 2021

PUNCH

Radoslav Rochallyi European Open Culture Network by Andrea Schmidt Radoslav Rochallyi, a Slovak poet with a Hungarian surname who lives in Prague and Malta, writes a mathematical poetry that is not easy to understand. His latest collection, PUNCH, builds on his previous experimental collections, including Golden Divine (self-published, 2016) and DNA (European Open Culture Network, […]

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro Alfred A. Knopf ($28) by Kris Novak In today’s world, is there a firm line between “human” and “artificial”? In his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro discusses subjects such as the dangers of technological advancement, the future of our world, and the meaning of being human that he also broached […]

To Break the Silence:
An Interview with Kim Echlin

by Allan Vorda Kim Echlin was born in Burlington, Ontario, where her high school teachers noticed her writing talent early on. She has received degrees from McGill University and Paris-Sorbonne University, as well as her PhD in English literature from York University; her thesis was on the translation of Ojibwe Nanabush myths. Echlin has been […]

Kamala’s Way: An American Life

Dan Morain Simon & Schuster ($28) by Mohd Yaziz Bin Mohd Isa How did the daughter of two immigrants—her mother from India and her father from Jamaica—rise to become America’s first Black woman vice-president? She did it Kamala’s way. Kamala’s Way: An American Life is a powerful biography of Kamala Harris, who, along with her […]

The Passenger

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz translated by Philip Boehm Metropolitan Books ($24.99) by Chris Barsanti In one of many unnerving scenes in Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s eerily prescient novel The Passenger, set in November 1938, German Jewish businessman Otto Silbermann rides on yet another train that he hopes will bring him to safety. Silbermann is on the run […]

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

John Murillo Four Way Books ($16.95) by Chaun Ballard With Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo delivers poems that body-check the landscape of present-day America through a critique of, you guessed it, contemporary American poetry. In this second collection, Murillo is armed with the lessons passed down by his father and the likes of Robert Caldwell—who, […]

Nancy

Bruno Lloret translated by Ellen Jones Two Lines Press ($19.95) by Austyn Wohlers A speculative and poetic first novel, Chilean writer Bruno Lloret’s Nancy comprises the deathbed recollections of its title character, a widow who is dying of cancer. Setting the book in the near future, in a politically fractured and ecologically collapsing Chile, Lloret […]

frank: sonnets

Diane Seuss Graywolf Press ($16) by Meryl Natchez Diane Seuss’s fifth book of poems, frank: sonnets, provides fresh imagery, calls out the male icons of the ’70s and early ’80s New York scene, and directly grapples with loneliness, addiction, abortion, and death. The language is often startling, the incidents pried open for the reader to […]

Cathedral

Ben Hopkins Europa Editions ($26) by David Wiley In F for Fake, his quasi-documentary about fraudulence in the art world, Orson Welles pauses in his descent into imposture to hold aloft Chartres Cathedral as perhaps the one true thing that our culture has created. It will be our legacy, he posits, and will “testify to […]

Saturn Peach

Lily Wang Gordon Hill Press ($20) by Greg Bem “I am rowing away from myself into myself,” writes Lily Wang at the start of her mesmerizing collection Saturn Peach. A five-sequence book of poetry rooted in memory and reflection, inquisitive imagery, and minimalist tones, the book contains just over 80 pages that repeatedly suggest how […]