Books
Books is generously sponsored by the Hawthornden Foundation.
“I’m interested / in the innate paradoxes / of the human soul,” declares Bianca Stone in one of many dense, excursive, intricately-woven poems from her fourth book, The Near and Distant World. Those three lines could serve as a thematic core for the entire collection, where Stone engages with theodicies, philosophies, aporias, psychoanalysis, and poetry to arrive at a greater sense of the self.
In these times of both climate disaster and our ability to embrace infinite hope, Deb Olin Unferth’s new novel holds particular resonance. From the sheer glory of the opening words: “In those years, the sky was full of sulfur and diamonds, shot into the air by cannons to scatter the sunlight,” to the depth of grief as it becomes clear that in this future it is too late to stop the destruction of our planet and most life.
Courtney Kocak’s debut memoir Girl Gone Wild follows her movement within an exploitative economy as both victim and agent, reading these dynamics as mutually constitutive. By structuring her story as a series of discrete episodes, Kocak traces her shift from being captured by the camera to taking it into her own hands.
Dog Days sits beyond the clarity of a good story, an easy plot that is rehearsed and narrated and constructed and demanded and peddled. This complicates the form of a review, with its insistence on summary: a couple of quick lines that place us, face down, on one side for seven hours, in the same hostage situation that this book is and isn’t about.
Kyle McCarthy’s dreamy novel Immersions reimagines Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, the French folktale about a wealthy man with an alarming habit of murdering his wives. But Immersions isn’t a simple retelling; it’s a nesting doll of a book, a coming-of-age story within a gothic romance, holding at its core the strength of a bond between two sisters.
As soon as I try to write any statement about James Loop’s writing, I realize one must also say the direct opposite. He is slippery like that, muscling against any singular school of thought or type of being like a fractal shining through a kaleidoscope onto a white wall, always shifting. And lucky are we that his work is also that beautiful.
Oana Aristide’s Astronaut! is the kind of novel that knows exactly what it’s doing without making a show of it. It moves in a calm, almost matter-of-fact way, while the world inside it keeps slipping sideways into something funnier, sadder, and more menacing than it first seemed.
Kill Dick follows an NYU student from Brentwood as she returns home to city on fire and a serial killer targeting addicts—a feverish, vociferous addition to the vaulted canon of LA noir. I met Goebel at his AWP off-site party for Kill Dick, shortly after he purchased a stake in iconic independent publisher New York Tyrant.
On the heels of her 2022 debut novel Paradise Close, Lisa Russ Spaar is fully aware she’s in the autumn of her life. Rather than a dark brood on mortality, Spaar’s collection opens readers to a meditation on the seasons of nature and life with sensual and evocative language.
In chaun webster’s first work of nonfiction, the words wail from the strain of pulling so much weight—what is unknowable about his family’s past, what can be extrapolated about their lives from the general history of racism in America, what an irreparable ache this engenders in the son who must attempt to reimagine people he never knew.
Annakeara Stinson’s debut draws you in under the guise of a revenge novel, which grips the reader before revealing itself to be a sharply-written character study. Nerve Damage starts out sprinting, overflowing with humor and paranoia.
Readers of Maria Adelmann’s entertaining, provocative new novel will find it hard to disagree with such sentiments. The Adjunct is a ripped-from-the-headlines dispatch from the front lines of the campus wars.
When I described Ambivalent Souls to my colleagues, they responded with some version of “Oh, so it’s more of an adaptation.” However, Tanner’s text, true to its subtitle, is a translation.
If the marketing copy for Portia Elan’s Homebound seems opaque, it’s because even the briefest plot summary risks spoilers, and part of the pleasure of this book lies in the way its storylines come together.
In Paige Lewis’s brilliant debut novel, Canon, the beautiful wife of an army general is abducted. War breaks out. A mercurial God pulls all of the strings.
Color me refreshed to have just read a collection in which fat people exist as something other than monstrous harbingers of horrors to come or targets of skinny people’s contempt. Throughout Emma Copley Eisenberg’s debut story collection, Fat Swim, other “minorities” are likewise humanized.
Colm Tóibín has done some serious time traveling in his recent novels. House of Names (2017) reimagines the dysfunctional family sagas of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, which were first conjured 2500 years ago by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus.
Poet Brad Walrond is the keeper of New York collectives and coalitions.
M Lin’s intriguing debut short story collection with Graywolf centers on the lives of mainland Chinese people. The Memory Museum “is not an immigrant book, but an emigrant and diaspora book.”
Hidden River is told through a series of fragments that shape-shift, growing shorter and longer, alongside the turbulence of Cass’s inner world. “I track the passage of time in entrance dings” goes the narration, unfurling the banality of routine.
Bob Bowen and Tom Huhn discuss Bowen’s new book, which offers a radical departure from standard histories of photography and cinema.
“The history of a poet in this form,” Boris Pasternak writes of autobiography, in his own autobiography (1958’s Nobel-awarded Safe Conduct) “is completely unthinkable. … It can’t be found under his name and must be looked for under someone else’s, in the biographical columns of his followers.”
Bestselling author Wally Lamb explores the idea of forgiveness in his latest novel, The River Is Waiting (a recent Oprah Book Club selection), which depicts the fallout from an unthinkable accident that changes one family forever, and tests whether a husband and wife are able to forgive themselves and the other.
Behind the State Capitol sets a multi-layered stage based on streetlife, homosexuality, travel, interpersonal relationships, mental health, drugs, the silver screen, and more in its theater. The challenge of being with this poetry is that it is often as unsettling as it is revealing.
Rhyme & Reason is less a history of poetry, and more of a history of poetry readers. Who were poems intended for? Who was reading them? Why were they so popular? Forsyth tracks English poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to W. H. Auden. It is expertly written, easily accessible, and instantly unforgettable.
Francis M. Naumann has been among the leading scholars of Marcel Duchamp’s art and life for decades, including his consequential interactions with Brazilian artist, Maria Martins, who kept a studio in New York during the 1940s. A thoroughly illustrated little monograph, entitled Impossible (after one of her sculptures), provides an account of the romance between Duchamp and Martins alluded to in his letters to her.
About a third of the way through A Day Like Any Other Schuyler’s poems begin to dot the pages, and Nathan Kernan hits his stride. He’s wonderful in walking us through a work, piecing together a line, and breaking a fourth wall in the process.
Darcey Steinke’s most recent book, the memoir This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith, is less a narrative than a sustained argument against that hierarchy.
In her novel and her stories, Nora Lange is a chronicler of all that is strange and secret about people, mining that strangeness for comedy and pathos.
In The Disinherited, Terrence Arjoon’s debut full-length poetry collection, we find we are not alone in a post-colonial world that seems to deny meaningful, shared interpretations of history.
There are lessons to be learned in Tolani Akinola’s debut novel, Leave Your Mess at Home.
Outlandish as it may sound, Kory Stamper has now given us a spiritedly breathless account of the effort to define thousands of different colors—define, as in “dictionary entry.”