Perhaps I had been waiting for exuberance. Perhaps, the former version of myself, before the loss, expected only ecstatic experiences to unfasten me from sorrow. Does time change me, or the attention to life? Perhaps both. Both have borne hope.
Sayaka Murata’s latest novel to be translated into English explores the way individuals try to move through a world that, ultimately, doesn’t make sense.
A few weeks after the release of his memoir, Sherman Alexie cancelled the second half of his national book tour. “I have been rebreaking my heart night after night,” he explained. Writing about pain had become a process of inflicting it on himself.
Beneath the waking nightmares, reanimated children, and mythological Wendigo, Stephen King’s 1983 novel is about a fundamental and universal experience: grief and the fear of death.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new work compels readers to pay attention to the dissolution of animal life and our reliance on it, to the ends of relationships, to the shortness of the human life span, and to the book’s own looming narrative endpoint. In this novel, all things have an end.
It is well understood by now the heavy toll that coal mining takes on geographic landscapes, their local populations, and the climate, despite practices of environmental remediation. There is also, however, another toll that mining takes—that all labor takes—on our individual bodies and lives.
Via the body, Warsan Shire wrenches us into sensuous and traumatic narratives that express hunger for love, rage at violation, the turmoil of illness, and an exquisite wish for restoration.
Monica West’s debut novel exposes the inevitable risks and losses that come along with disentanglement from family and church structures. Her protagonist’s strength, coming-into-power, and voice are compelling, but they are costly.
Much of Kristen Arnett’s second novel is about how we craft our stories to fit our needs, especially when we feel trapped, or frightened.
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