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My sister’s body was found twelve days after her birthday, which was the last time I’d seen her. The silence of the interval was nothing extraordinary; we didn’t have reason to speak, and the older we got, the more reason we needed. Our family, like any other, had a certain tension built into it. Falling-outs…
For readers who share his sensitivity to the spiritual, Kaveh Akbar forges an interfaith poetics based on shared humanity and sharply rendered difference, manifested in an ethics of interruption. We find each other, the collection seems to say, in our shared search for the divine, wounded and harnessing the forces of personal and political power.
“I recalled Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ when trying to make sense of my daughter’s intellectual disability as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Like Orbis Tertius, the DSM seemed to me like a product of a secret society gradually working to shape a reality of their own.”
Elena Ferrante often uses objects in her fiction to explore relationships and time, but she also uses them as objective correlatives; while the bracelet in her 2019 novel serves as a way to move the reader through the plot, it is also clearly identified as an object, one that carries symbolic meaning.
From the beginning to the end of the novel, Luiz Ruffato gives us a moment-by-moment account of his protagonist’s activities, thoughts, and feelings—a stream-of-consciousness narrative in which, as the novel progresses, the character’s memories of the past become more and more prominent.
Natsuko Imamura’s 2019 novel reads at first glance as a fairly straightforward psychological thriller, with voyeurism is at its center. Imamura, however, also explores a deeper psychological entanglement, stemming from a desire to connect when social interaction feels like an insurmountable barrier.
Far from being un-American, Trump’s deployment of the “illusory truth effect” is supremely so. Indeed, it is in lock step with the shady rhetorical strategies employed by Trump’s Puritan forbearer John Winthrop. Like Trump, Winthrop’s hustle depended upon his followers seeing what they actually couldn’t, and unseeing what was right in front of them.
While the objectivity of memory—and even its actual substance—is consistently brought into question in Kyoko Nakajima’s stories, what remains clear are the emotions attached to the act of remembering and the way these emotions meaningfully link individuals or objects across time.
José Martí, Margarita Engle, and the San Isidro Movement have contributed, over the course of a century, to the long tradition of writing about a free Cuba through poetics. The government knows the revolutionary history and power of artists and poets in Cuba, and they fear it.
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