A Gothic Bender: ‘The Empusium’ by Olga Tokarczuk

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Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “in the summer of 1914 the roof of the over-admired European civilization simply fell in.” The conditions that led to the collapse of reason and the death of 16 million people during World War I haunt The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk’s wry new novel (translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones; 320 pages; Riverhead). Set in the fall of 1913, just months before the start of the First World War, the novel’s protagonist Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young engineer arrives at a “consumption free” mountain resort in Görbersdorf, an Alpine town in Prussian Silesia (now […]

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Seeing the Meaning: ‘The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt’

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Concrete poetry, a literary arts movement started in the 1950s, is meant to reflect the material inspiring a poem through its emphasis on reduced language. One of the movement’s leaders, and one of its few American female contributors, was Mary Ellen Solt (1920-2007). Solt used the form to reject previous examples of prose poems and focus instead on creating work that was “communicating” to the reader its physical form and structure before its content could, thus bringing a poem closer to its words true meaning. Solt would edit the landmark 1968 anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View, which was published […]

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But One Thing Among the Living: ‘The Trees’ by Claudia Peña Claros

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Bolivian author Claudia Peña Claros’s new story collection, The Trees (118 pages; Relegation Books), translated by Robin Myers, blends acute awareness of plant and animal life with a keen perception of the rhythms of the everyday, noting telling details in the smallest occurrences. Peña Claros is also a poet, and this is evident throughout the inventive prose in The Trees.  All of the senses are activated in these language-rich narratives that tend to focus on gender, justice, and the natural world: “We listen to the insects roaming our blood invisibly, anticipating our decay. We listen to the wriggling of the […]

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Feeling Through the Open Space: ‘Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō’

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If you are the author of a country’s two most beloved poems, you have officially made it. And if that country happens to be Japan—where poetry is a fundamental part of the nation’s fabric—you’ve made it twice over. You’re like Shakespeare and The Stones. This is the case for Matsuo Bashō, whose influence within Japan (and beyond) is so great, it is impossible to map. Bashō (1644-1694) is more contemporary than many people imagine. He was born the same year Descartes penned Cogito ergo sum, and several years after the death of Shakespeare. Thus, Bashō, at least chronologically, is a […]

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Marital Dis: ‘Liars’ by Sarah Manguso

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Married women often provide more care and invisible labor out of love. But it’s the expectation that they will provide it, and the cultural moralism associated with how they do it, that informs Sarah Manguso’s newest tour de force, Liars (256 pages; Hogarth). Coming out at a time when the genre of divorce books is ever-expanding (Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, and Miranda July’s All Fours), Manguso’s novel explores the subject of abuse (including self-abuse) and presents marriage as a patriarchal institution inextricable from it. As Mary Beard wrote in Women & Power, “You can’t easily […]

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Home as the Uncanny: Q&A with Laura van den Berg

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Laura van den Berg’s eerie latest novel, State of Paradise (224 pages; Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), resembles her other five acclaimed books—most notably an intense short story in I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and her first novel, Find Me, which was set during an epidemic that impacts memory—but deeply forges a path into original, glimmering territory. The book asks, What is real? And what if there are many realities and many ways of getting to them? For seamlessly meshing speculative and autobiographical elements, State of Paradise has been called “speculative autofiction.” (Van den Berg’s story collection Isle of […]

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The Balm: ‘All Friends Are Necessary’ by Tomas Moniz

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If we are to believe the doomsayers, entrenched problems like drugs, homelessness, car break-ins, and years of COVID isolation have led to a fraying of our social bonds that have turned cities—especially San Francisco and Oakland—into foreboding places people can’t leave soon enough. But from the opening pages of Tomas Moniz’s new novel, All Friends Are Necessary (288 pages; Algonquin), Moniz wrests our minds from the catastrophists by capturing the sheer exuberance of the San Francisco Bay Area—with its beloved parks, bars, museums, Mission Street bookstores, and East Bay cronut shops. The novel celebrates the quirky denizens who brim with […]

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Dream states: A conversation with Ed Park

by Evelyn Ch'ien

Posted on by John McMurtrie

How do we share history after it has already been claimed? That is the question at the heart of Ed Park’s latest novel. A fiction finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, Same Bed Different Dreams is a riveting, revisionist take on Korean and American history—or at least what is assumed to be Korean and American history. The reconstruction of history from 1919 to the contemporary era, with multiple characters intersecting through parallel timelines, propels the head-spinning momentum of the book, centered on the true but stealth, ghostlike existence of […]

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The memory of murder: The San Ysidro massacre, 40 years later

by Kevin Smokler

Posted on by John McMurtrie

1. The monument consists of twenty-one hexagonal marble pillars set in a pyramid. The pillars range in height between one and six feet, representing the range in age of the victims. The oldest was seventy-four and had stopped to pick up hamburgers on the way to visit his grandchildren. The youngest was six months old and died in the arms of his mother, also murdered. 2. The plaque in front of the monument reads, “Dedicated as a living memorial to those who died so tragically on July 18, 1984 and to those survivors who continue to bear the scars of that […]

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Close quarters: ‘Blue Ruin’ by Hari Kunzru

by Olivia Kane

Posted on by John McMurtrie

Coming out of the pandemic, one could be forgiven for not wanting to dive into a novel set during that not-so distant past. Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin, however, vividly captures the anxiety of a world in quarantine while simultaneously offering a riveting glimpse into the lives of artists struggling to survive. Jay, the protagonist of Blue Ruin (Knopf; $28), is a former artist who finds himself delivering groceries to the wealthy in upstate New York. After contracting COVID-19, his hard-hearted New York City landlord casts him out of his apartment. It is under these circumstances that he makes a delivery […]

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Road Warrior: ‘Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell’

by Paul Wilner

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There’s some grainy footage of a 1966 performance by Joni Mitchell on a show called “Let’s Sing Out” for students at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. When you first see Mitchell, she looks like “girl singer’’ furniture, a la Mary Travers, as the trio she’s playing with motor through a painfully corny tune that could be an outtake from A Mighty Wind, the documentary spoof about a folk music reunion concert. But wait. When Mitchell steps forward to sing her deeply autobiographical tune, “Urge for Going,’’ you feel a collective breath going out, not just from the audience but from […]

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