Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2018. 216 pages.
As director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, Philip Metres might be expected to champion political…
MISCELLANEOUS
London. Pushkin Press. 2018. 130 pages. Giorgio van Straten’s day job as director of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York seems to have been tailor-made for him. He is a public intellectual wh…
New York. Hachette. 2018. 284 pages. The case for universal basic income (UBI)—whereby the state makes regular, unconditional income payments to all its working-age citizens—is gaining increasing trac…
Paris. Gallimard. 2018. 509 pages. Philippe Lançon was shot in the face and left for dead during the January 7, 2015, jihadi terrorist attack in Paris that targeted the journalists and cartoonists of…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2018. 225 pages. Far south of Buenos Aires lie the isolated steppes of Patagonia, Argentina’s southernmost region. For Argentines, Patagonia is considered a backwat…
Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan Press. 2018. 228 pages. Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s bracing text diagnoses an identity crisis in African literature, its source the English Metaphysical Empire (EME),…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2018. 410 pages. The poet and critic Meena Alexander begins her introduction to the anthology Name Me a Word with a personal anecdote about her…
Vancouver. Greystone Books. 2018. 312 pages. It sounds like a lovely pastime, diving to observe sweetly absurd-looking seahorses (genus Hippocampus), but what is its relevance to a book about…
Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago Books. 2018. 160 pages. The Barefoot Woman is a living-record document, the voice of culture, tradition, and hope as well as a representation of the history li…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2017. 275 pages. Slight Exaggeration announces itself playfully, in a faithful translation of the Polish opening: “I won’t tell all regardless.” “I…
New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2017. 376 pages. Romanian Literature as World Literature, a collection of comparative essays from sixteen authors, seeks to situate Romanian literature in the c…
Madrid. La Huerta Grande Editorial. 2017. 139 pages. Juan Carlos Chirinos concludes Venezuela wishing that his book might be the portrayal of “a displaced soul that converges into a greater g…
Paris. Seuil. 2018. 184 pages. Ever since Le Gone du Chaâba (1986), Azouz Begag’s novels have been autobiographical, exploring his background as the child of impoverished Algerian immigrants…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2017. 128 pages. There is a long tradition of dualism in Western thought and culture. Many times philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have presented the world as…
New York. Harper Perennial. 2018. 272 pages. In her new memoir, author Porochista Khakpour delves into her own history of illness and addiction to craft a harrowing tale of sickness in all its forms a…
New York. Archipelago. 2018. 1,164 pages. Karl Ove Knausgaard has been crowned “the ideal writer of the present moment.” His six-part novel, My Struggle, sold half a million copies in Norway,…
Stockholm. Atlas. 2017. 279 pages. Tanjas gata: Rysk vardag 1917–2017 (Tanya’s street: Everyday life in Russia, 1917–2017) is the fourth volume in a quartet of books about contemporary Russia…
New York. Ecco. 2017. 304 pages. In his foundational essay “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” (The human factors of Cubanness), Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz wrote what has become one of the…
Boston. Nicholas Brealey. 2018. 195 pages. If you’ve ever given the side eye to a double-decker tour bus while tramping through foreign streets—or been guilty yourself of hopping on the top deck, came…
Berkeley, California. Stone Bridge Press. 2018. 308 pages. In March 2004 Tracy Franz began a journal to document a period of separation from her husband, a Zen monk spending a year at a six-hundred-ye…
New York. Viking. 2018. 576 pages. The heart of Steven Pinker’s important new book is in its title: Enlightenment Now. It is a stalwart defense of the ideals of the Enlightenment, recasting t…
Prague. Karolinum Press. 2018. 179 pages. Post Bellum is a Czech organization, mainly comprised of historians and reporters, dedicated to keeping alive the memories of witnesses to the twentieth centu…
Budapest. Magvető. 2017. 500 pages. Although it is advertised as “the first part of György Konrád’s roman-fleuve” (regényfolyam), Falevelek szélben (Ásatás I) (Leaves in the Wind [Excavation…
Mobile, Alabama. Negative Capability Press. 2017. 202 pages. Chris Arthur knows what an essay is: an attempt to reach a further, transcendent understanding through writing. Chris Arthur’s 2017 collect…
Boston. Academic Studies Press. 2017. 336 pages. This dense, exciting anthology brings together fifteen Ukrainian poetry and prose writers with works from the late-Soviet and, mostly, post-Soviet peri…