Books
Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter
By Yvonne C. GarrettThere’s a special pleasure in picking up a new Kevin Barry book. I know I’m likely in for a wild ride of a story and sentences that force the English language into strange and musical shapes.
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel
By John DominiThis new fiction from Yoko Tawada never quits picking at its phonemes and morphemes. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel makes an origami of the very term “protagonist.”
Théo Casciani with Donatien Grau
It is rare to meet a writer whose work is so striking that nothing can be edited, nothing can be changed, for the vision is so precise. When this writer is twenty nine years old, it is even more striking. Then, you see them develop, embark on new adventures, expand their vision, participate in their medium, and you are always more struck.
We the People
By Chris CampanioniAt the beginning of each semester, one of the first things I do with my students is ask them to come up with a list of the objects that are no longer in their lives.
In Conversation
Kevin Barry with Tadhg Hoey
I spoke with Kevin recently ahead of the publication of his latest novel, The Heart in Winter, which is set in the late nineteenth century in Butte, Montana, and tells the story of two runaway lovers, Tom and Polly. When we spoke, he was at home in rural Sligo, in the West of Ireland. I asked him how his day was going and he told me he was tired. He and his wife had spent the previous night trying to get a bat out of their bedroom.
In Conversation
Lena Valencia with Jessie Ren Marshall
In Mystery Lights, Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection about women facing danger in the American Southwest, the Brooklyn-based writer blends literary fiction with supernatural elements. The book is delightful—menacing, smart, cozy-creepy, both strange and familiar—and it provides a vexing reflection of modern society.
Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists
By Loré YessuffThroughout the story, Savaş strings together daily rituals, random observations, and philosophical musings, revealing how the quiet frictions and splendors of the everyday mold the kind of life one makes for themselves.
Sable Yong’s Die Hot With a Vengeance
By Anson TongSable Yong, in Die Hot With a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity, examines a variety of ominous vanity-orbiting nouns that can be semi-jokingly, semi-seriously capitalized and trademarked—BeautyTM, WellnessTM, PerfumeTM, HairTM, among others.
Joy Williams’s Concerning the Future of Souls
By Vincent ScarpaReading Williams’s new collection of short-short stories, Concerning the Future of Souls—something of a follow-up to 2016’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God—one comes away from the experience with the belief that Williams has something like a preternatural insight into our predicaments: life, death, and the discomposing interim between the two.
Colm Tóibín’s Long Island
By Yvonne C. GarrettPicking up twenty years after Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s Long Island continues themes of longing, missed connections, and the destructive silences between families and lovers.
Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit
By John DominiAs exciting as I found Fire Exit, its fresh take on family secrets and backwoods Americana, ultimately it had me thinking about a social issue, even political.
