Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
Greenwell’s novel feels at once perilously modern and coolly baroque; a Sebaldian melancholy wafts up like a fog through the spaces in his lovingly turned sentences.
Book Reviews
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
In Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, conversation has the power to shape the story of a life.
The Hills Reply by Tarjei Vesaas
Vesaas’s language is rich and thickening, replete with extended metaphors that are visionary, haunting, and half-mad, recalling the ebullient, runaway brushwork of Van Gogh.
All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal
Vulnerable and wise, Hrabal’s gorgeous memoir subtly probes the depths of a fragile, troubled psyche, turning a subject as potentially benign as pet ownership into a platform of interlocking drama and introspection.
Frolic and Detour by Paul Muldoon
Like Ashbery in his final collections, or Cohen in his final albums, Paul Muldoon has nothing left to prove, and can take delight simply in doing what he inimitably does. And his delight is ours.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
In her new memoir, Machado tells a story of abuse that often goes unrecognized, exploring what happens when we don’t have ready narrative models for our experiences.
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
Oyamada’s new novel is a tale of inaction rather than revolt, a story about the warm, velvety embrace of production models. Her characters seem exemplars of a particularly post-millennial brand of jaded helplessness, one that’s the result of living lives in the shadow of exploitative labor systems so all-encompassing that they’re difficult to rebel against.
Last of Her Name by Mimi Lok
In Mimi Lok’s debut story collection, the characters are linked in their sense of displacement and isolation, both connected to and separate from their families and their shared histories.
Girl by Edna O’Brien
Edna O’Brien performs a sort of tight-rope act, strung between the stream-like nature of her prose and the painful shards of her story. Brutality stomps through the pages of her new novel, astonishing in its recurrence and terrifying in the variable justifications that underpin it.