Pola Oloixarac’s ‘Mona’ Offers a Glimpse into the Writer’s Mind
Pola Oloixarac’s novel, ‘Mona’, explores how much effort a person must make to be understood.
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How the Cultural Revolution Turned China Against Itself
Yang Jisheng's remarkable historical autopsy, The World Turned Upside Down, is scrupulous in detailing the Cultural Revolution's horrors and insanities but too often leaves out the human side of history.
Is Solipsism Art? On ‘The Exhibition of Persephone Q’
Jessi Jezewska Stevens' debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, is filled with exciting ideas and quirky characters, but the book's surfeit of style can't make up for a lack of personality or perspective.
‘Uncanny Valley’: When the Confidence Boys Took Over Everything
Anna Wiener's Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley, reveals a piratical industry choking on its own hubris and blind to the cost of its destruction.
A Life of False Positives: Jac Jemc’s ‘False Bingo’
The stories in Jac Jemc's False Bingo are wound tight, propelling the reader to ambiguous and nerve-wracking ends.
On André Aciman’s Psychodrama of Flirting with New Beaus While Brooding over Old Flames, ‘Find Me’
André Aciman's long-awaited sequel to Call Me By Your Name, Find Me, isn't so much an extension of the previous book's queries about romance and sexuality as it is a work of convenient revisionism.
A Biography Worthy of ‘Hiroshima’ Author John Hersey
John Hersey covered Hiroshima and America's race riots with empathy, courage, and profound humility. Jeremy Treglown's biography, Mr. Straight Arrow, should bring a new generation of readers to Hersey's work.
Two Fascist Perspectives on WWII: The Colonel’s Wife and Deviation
Authors Rosa Liksom and Luce D'Eramo brilliantly convey the seduction and willful disbelief associated with fascism; how one brushes off their misgivings, thinking that it will be different for them.
Joseph Scapellato’s ‘The Made-Up Man’ Brings Forth 21st Century Absurdism
In rendering his most avant-garde characters as members of a kind of self-help conspiracy in The Made-Up Man, Joseph Scapellato offers not an update but a revision of absurdism, and as such, many social phenomena ripe for satire get off easy.
‘Can Democracy Work?’ Is the Essential Question We Must Continue to Grapple With
James Miller's Can Democracy Work? is a coming-of-age story for a generation of Americans whose ideals of social, economic, and political progress foundered on the rocks of brute capitalist power.
‘Half Gods’ and Painful Fragments
In debut short story collection Half Gods, Akil Kumarasamy gives us the painful fragments of her characters' experiences with care, as if she is handing us shards of broken glass.
Owls, Aliens, and Others
Essayist Brian Phillips is no staunch empiricist, nor does he want to shatter delusions or expose machinations. In Impossible Owls, he is content to remain in a wide-eyed and owl-ier place.
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