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In Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, a relationship between mother and son becomes a catalyst for analyzing domestic boundaries. At it’s heart, it’s a story about motherhood and personal responsibility.
Robert Mugabe’s resignation last month was the most significant development in Zimbabwean politics in a generation. One way of assessing the shadow of Mugabe’s brutal hold over Zimbabwe’s history is assessing the shadow he casts over Zimbabwe’s post-independence fiction. This is significant.
Jamaica Kincaid’s debut book, At the Bottom of the River, is published to immediate acclaim in December of 1983. The thin volume weaves surreal narratives of post-colonial island life, complicated female relationships, and the pervasive longing for self-actualization.
In literature, scenes of decoration are charged with dramatic potential. In leaving their marks on spaces in this exaggerated way, characters show themselves to us.
When we first pick up a book, how much buy-in comes from whether or not we actually like it, versus being entirely psychosocially implicated in a culture of reader opinions and college syllabi and corporate marketing tactics and the existence of the Penguin Classics? Is either form of buy-in more valuable than the other?
Kate Hargreaves is a writer and roller derby skater who also happens to be one of the most active literary book and cover designers in Canada over the past few years, having designed titles for numerous presses.
Sarajevo Roses is a volume packed with journeys, but this is a poet who attends to the enduring as well as the transient, he constructs gritty, unsentimental pastorals in the noble peasant tradition of Clare, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.
War is strangely quiet in Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasm’s debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage.The titular brevity refers to the novel’s running time, which takes place over the course of a single day, but the story and its scope are anything but perfunctory.
“To them, we were complete aliens.” So begins the first attempt by the unnamed protagonist of Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids to define himself and his fellow reformatory boys in wartime Japan. His last attempt is this: “I was only a child, tired, insanely angry, tearful, shivering with cold and hunger.” Like…
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