Book Reviews

Review: YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE by Alexandra Kleeman
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Review: YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE by Alexandra Kleeman

YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE Alexandra Kleeman Harper, August 2015 283 pp, $25.99 Buy hardcover | eBook | trade paperback | audio Seeming unmoored from both tangible responsibility and abstract constructs, like Mersualt in Camus’ The Stranger, “A”—the narrator of Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine—drifts…

Review: THE CITY AT THREE PM: WRITING, READING, AND TRAVELING by Peter LaSalle
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Review: THE CITY AT THREE PM: WRITING, READING, AND TRAVELING by Peter LaSalle

The City at Three PM: Writing, Reading, and Traveling Peter LaSalle Dzanc Books, December 15 2015 280 pp; $15.95 Buy paperback We read travel writers for a variety of reasons, but often it is for the vicarious thrill of the journey, somewhat akin to schadenfreude in that we can happily wince at a traveler’s discomforts…

Review: WHAT’S THE STORY by Sydney Lea
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Review: WHAT’S THE STORY by Sydney Lea

WHAT’S THE STORY Sydney Lea, Essays Green Writer’s Press, Nov 2015 224 pp; $19.95 Buy: paperback Now in his 70s, Vermont Poet Laureate and founder of New England Review Sydney Lea presents in this collection nearly seventy lyrical meditations in prose on what he calls the biggest surprise of his life, “turning into an elderly man.”…

Words Chosen For Ourselves: A Review of THE OXFORD INDIA ANTHOLOGY OF TAMIL DALIT WRITING
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Words Chosen For Ourselves: A Review of THE OXFORD INDIA ANTHOLOGY OF TAMIL DALIT WRITING

The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing Ravikumar and R. Azhagarasan Oxford University Press, 2012 480 pp, $39.95 Buy hardcover Of the social, political, and economic issues facing India since independence in 1947, the situation of Dalits has been one of the most pressing. Dalits face discrimination and oppression in nearly every part of…

Review: Marcel Proust’s IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME: SWANN’S WAY – A Graphic Novel by Stéphane Heuet
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Review: Marcel Proust’s IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME: SWANN’S WAY – A Graphic Novel by Stéphane Heuet

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME: SWANN’S WAY by Marcel Proust Adaptation & Drawings by Stéphane Heuet Translated by Arthur Goldhammer Liveright, English reprint ed. July 2015 240 pp, $26.95 Buy hardcover | eBook  There are few challenges as alluringly counterintuitive as adapting Proust; attempts to do so have produced wildly varying results in a surprising array of…

Becoming-Citizen: A Review of NATURALISM by Wendy Xu
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Becoming-Citizen: A Review of NATURALISM by Wendy Xu

  Naturalism Wendy Xu Brooklyn Arts Press, Nov 15 2015 42 pp, $5 – $15 Buy: pdf | paperback | signed bundle Wendy Xu’s Naturalism opens with a dedication: “To immigrant parents.” That’s one of the most direct statements in the chapbook, and the eleven poems that follow create such a surreal mixture that it’s hard…