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In rendering Homi Bhabha’s concept of the unhomely, or “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world—the unhomeliness—that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations,” through the sounds and daily events of a young girl’s life, Jhumpa Lahiri exposes a particular formation of unhomeliness inherent to diasporic experience.
Xiaolu Guo’s new novel is a restless and mesmerizing portrait of the immigrant experience.
Mizumura Minae’s career has been focused on exploring this question in formally inventive ways that often incorporate her own cross-cultural autobiography. In the process, she has managed to transcend the specifics of her own personal story, creating a body of work with incisive things to say about the individual’s relationship to language, culture, and history.
Smith’s first nonfiction offering is a product of a project she took on in a time of grief: she took to Twitter to offer herself a daily public pep talk in the form of three sentences or less. The resulting works, segmented in the book by paragraphs of hindsight commentary, are like poems with purpose.
The stories in Schwartz’s new collection offer us an invitation to the unknown in ourselves and in the world. Turn to the impossible, they tell us, and explore it. We cannot help but do so since, after all, the impossible is going to show up if we’re ready or not.
Heid E. Erdrich’s new collection is more than a healing of past wounds. Rather, it is remarkable precisely because it posits the act of speaking as liberatory practice, a difficult action that will project us into a different and less abusive future together.
In Mirror Suite, Federico García Lorca explores questions of selfhood using the mirror as his guiding motif, asking how love manages to endure when other people’s interior lives seem so utterly inaccessible, and what it means for an imperfect person to be made in the image of God.
Part myth, part bildungsroman, part queer love story with a lyric, fabulist delivery, Chang’s debut novel, out today, is a novel of the body—its mundane functions, its power to create life, the ways in which it decays—as well as what can be done to a body—by war, from domestic violence, when aroused.
The fictional, nameless nation in Katie Kitamura’s 2012 novel is a country of men obsessed with possession. They care to possess land, money, women. What use these things might be to them is hardly of any interest. The main thing is to own them, to overpower them, and only then decide whether to exploit them.
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