Illus. Chris Maynard. Northampton, Massachusetts. Orion Magazine. 2023. 176 pages.
It will come as no surprise to readers of Orion, the publishers of this volume, that a book which dr…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 280 pages.152 pages. Understanding what it means to be well and how to take care of our well-being is a common motif found in both life and litera…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2024. 152 pages. Fifty-nine-year-old Éric Chevillard is revered in France as one of its most original postmodernist authors. He has publ…
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2023. 242 pages. The thesis of North Country: Essays on the Upper Midwest and Regional Identity is that the Upper Midwest of the…
New York. Penguin Press. 2023. 356 pages. Peter Turchin is predicting a grave spiral of political turmoil that may well end badly for the American body politic. Employing a synthesis…
Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 208 pages. Born in Kolkata, India, in 1973, Shumona Sinha started studying French fairly late, at the age of twenty-two. She moved to France six years later, i…
Cambridge, UK. Polity Press. 2023. 225 pages. Today, confessional memoirs often hail from the margins of religious experience. With Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss (2013), it is tha…
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2023 (©2022). 253 pages. With an international team of academics, translators, linguists, and poets, Piotr Florczyk and K. A. Wisniewski put the spotlight on authors, pu…
London. Seagull. 2023. 116 pages. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s advocacy of Africans writing in their own African languages and then translating to other African and foreign languages began in…
New York. Pantheon. 2023. 368 pages. At first glance, the thinkers spotlighted in William Egginton’s book don’t necessarily belong together. Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges, and Wern…
New York. Row House. 2023. 339 pages. In the field of art conservation, the term “dwell time” describes the time in which it takes for a cleaning product to work on a targeted materi…
Athens. Vine Leaves Press. 2023. 160 pages. Jennifer Lang’s memoir-in-miniature, Places We Left Behind, is a palimpsest of time and space mapped across the end of the twentieth centur…
Beijing. Peking University Press. 2023. 334 pages. To remind himself of the paramount importance of the philosophical tradition of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese Shang Dynasty’s e…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 258 pages. “New Experiences slipped through his fingers like grains of sand, never to be touched again.” My Father’s Brain: Life in the Shadow of Al…
New York. Flatiron Books. 2023. 304 pages. To many, mathematics is quite separate from literature; however, that is very far from reality. Mathematics has remained an indispensable pa…
Paris. Grasset. 2023. 256 pages. Born in Haiti in 1953, Dany Laferrière has been living abroad since 1976, mostly in Quebec, but also in Florida and in France. His first novel, How to…
Mexico City. Penguin Random House. 2022. 647 pages. Bursting with intelligence and information, this compilation by the prolific cultural critic and intellectual Christopher Domínguez Michael is a vad…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2022. 240 pages. Groundglass is a lyric essay collection through which Kathryn Savage grapples with the idea of home and belonging in a world where we…
Seattle. Fantagraphics. 2023. 184 pages. Graphic biographies are a fairly new phenomenon, and the genre definitely has legs. Graphic form can constrain the narrative via the conventio…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2023. 259 pages. As journal-style prose, Out of the Sugar Factory draws on both history and literature to capture the world’s present and past fixation…
Dallas. BenBella Books. 2022. 320 pages. A good amount of caution is advised when approaching any work that claims to present a “theory of everything,” which “bridge[s] the gap between the quantum and…
Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2022. 501 pages. It would be easy for readers to feel daunted by the scale of this volume. Totaling over a quarter-of-a-million words, with thirty-five contribut…
New York. Pantheon. 2022. 394 pages. Ever since Art Spiegelman’s Maus first appeared—part 1 in 1986, part 2 in 1991—critics and readers have been arguing about it. The starting point for these discuss…
London. Alma Books. 2022. 358 pages. Is there anything authentically new to add to the already well-known story of the Romantic poet John Keats’s heartbreaking final days? Alessandro Gallenzi thought…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2023. 400 pages. Elixir is the latest example of Kapka Kassabova’s knack for sensory and poignant nonfiction. Her previous books, Border and To the Lake, were two unforget…