Zach Davidson
Philippe Petit's On the High Wire
By Zach DavidsonPhilippe Petits On the High Wire (New Directions) is a slim handbook that is divided into twenty-four sections, ranging from The Quest for Immobility to The High Wire Walkers Salute to The King Poles and, lastly, to Fear. Petits writing is frequently as nimble and as playful, as surprising and as unflinching, as his feats on the wire.
Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening
By Zach DavidsonThe quest to deliver on behalf of someone elsealive or deadshapes Natalia Ginzburgs Voices in the Evening. Ginzburgs novel begins in the wake of World War II, in a fictional Italian village, where the 27-year-old narrator, Elsa, and her mother are returning home from her mothers doctor appointment.
Mark Kingwell: "Wish I Were Here"
By Zach DavidsonNeoliberal boredom is the main focus of Wish I Were Here. It hinges on a kind of cannibalistic pointlessness, whereby we produce and consume ourselves at a cost of our own satisfaction by design. Because if we were satisfiedby scrolling, via swiping, through postingour engagement with these respective platforms would end (at least temporarily), which would not be in the interest of their makers, of their shareholders, who, in this attention economy, covet our eyes, our thumbs, our clicks for all time.
Bohumil Hrabal's All My Cats
By Zach DavidsonIn Bohumil Hrabals memoir All My Cats, the limitsof empathy, of understanding, of life and deathare distended as Hrabal attempts to chart and to pilot the intense disgust he feels for a life that has, in his eyes, necessitated an outcome of violence.