Category: Book Reviews

Canon Wars Redux: On Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?

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Cover of Naomi Kanakia's What's So Great About the Great Books?

Taste, Naomi Kanakia explains, is one facet of how Great Books shape us. Our ability to appreciate great literature, to “discriminate, to discern fine nuances, and to see what truly exists within an object, versus what we are projecting onto it,” is cultivated by reading classics made timeless by their rigor, honesty, and care. Through an intimate discourse on identity and literature, What’s So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) (272 pages; Princeton University Press), interrogates the canon. Kanakia’s comprehensive survey of books draws on several traditions, borrowing from […]

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A Map of Desire: Thomas Dai’s Take My Name but Say It Slow: Essays

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Cover of Thomas Dai's Take My Name But Say it Slow

In Thomas Dai’s essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (288 pages; Norton), Dai crafts deeply contemplative meditations on growing up Chinese American and navigating queer identity. The diptych of parallel reminisces that composes pieces such as “Running Days” and “Driving Days” evokes calm summers in Wenzhou made meaningful by his grandparents’ steady presence, as well as the particularities of traveling alone as an MFA student, styling himself after butterfly-lover Vladimir Nabokov and gay photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. Dai’s astute observations about identity fold back on themselves in Eastern-inflected asides on Chinese philosophy and nonbeing, and through nostalgic […]

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Restored to Flight: Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani

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Preeti Vangani’s searing, sharp Fifty Mothers (67 pages; River River Books) captures the essence of grieving a parent. The linked poems in the collection reach for emotional highs and nadirs; rage makes peace with eros and falls back toward love. The collection, set in Bombay though Vangani now lives in San Francisco, is bookended by pages from the poet’s late mother’s college diaries, the first page taken from 1984-85. The diary’s details read like an erasure—what would have been her mother’s narrative overwritten by details about Vangani’s father’s identity, the couple’s shared bank account. The inclusion suggests Vangani’s light humor […]

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Working Fires: A Look Inside the Life of Hotshots

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In 2025, wildfires again broke records. The year began with the Eaton and Palisades fires, and over the course of the year, ten thousand more wildfires burned than the ten-year average. We live in a world where megafires occur with regularity, alongside disasters like the Lahaina, Palisades, and Eaton fires. While we may become inured to political headlines, the again-ness winning out, the proliferation of destructive wildfires continues to increase both in the American psyche and in reality. And who better to write on these fires than those who fight them? In three memoirs released last summer, authors recount their […]

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A Poetics of Survival: On Richard Siken’s ‘Crush’ and ‘I Do Know Some Things’

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Cover of Richard Siken's I Do Know Some Things

Richard Siken can’t help but love you. Supported by the scaffolding of the camera and the director’s chair, Crush, the author’s 2005 collection—selected by Louise Glück for the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award—demands your complicity. The speaker builds set after set and commands your presence within it: We’re shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me Spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth. (“Dirty […]

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Remembering Analogically: ‘Analog Days’ by Damion Searls

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The cover of Damion Searls's Analog Days

One day in June, the narrator of Damion Searls’s debut novella, Analog Days (120 pages; Coffee House Press), steps away from the narrative, allowing ambient coffee-shop dialogue to populate the pages: “Decaf soy latte! / Here. Thanks / It’s hot / Ooh!”  It’s the first instance where the text seems to adhere to the reportage implied by the time stamps that structure its chronology (June 29, 2016), shedding story and morphing into notes in a journal. Here, the scene appears exclusively as quoted language, as information, the present breaking through the past tense that governs the novella up to this […]

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Vocabulary Lesson: ‘Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer’

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“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,’’ Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.’’ The brilliant, troubled figure identified with the Berkeley Renaissance—a coterie of fellow littérateurs including Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser—cut his own cartographic path, calling on magic to bring his muse to life even as he was frustrated by the difficulties of finding the broader recognition he courted, and despised. The recent publication of Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (512 pages; Wesleyan University Press) returns us to this complex world in voluminous depth. It was edited by […]

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Ever the Same: Bernadette Mayer’s ‘The Golden Book of Words’

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Originally published in 1978, the late Bernadette Mayer’s poetry collection The Golden Book of Words is available again from New Directions, reissued with the gorgeous original cover design by Joe Brainard. The collection includes both better-known early poems like “Essay” (“I guess it’s too late to live on the farm / I guess it’s too late to move to a farm / I guess it’s too late to begin farming”) and a variety of other, equally vibrant and formally inventive poems such as “Simplicities are Glittering” and “What Babies Really Do.” Mayer, associated with the Language Poets and the New […]

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A Kafka Gaze: ‘Animal Stories’ by Kate Zambreno

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Standing at the monkey house in Jardin des Plantes, Kate Zambreno and her two-year-old daughter encounter an older woman who, though not an employee, leads them to the enclosure. Crowded by tourists’ flash photography, a newborn orangutan named Java nurses from her mother, Theodora. Zambreno mimes to her daughter—“milky”—in their shared language, and as they take in this special moment of connection with the captive primates, she also feels Theodora’s weariness, and wishes her privacy. The dailiness of the monkey house, she writes, is punctuated by events like these. When do we see ourselves most in zoo animals? During sharp […]

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Beyond the Grasp of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s ‘Exophony’

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Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (192 pages; New Directions), acclaimed Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada’s first essay collection available in English, explores Tawada’s lifelong fascination with language, foreignness, and, more generally, “exophony,” which she understands as existence outside one’s mother tongue.  The book, writes Lisa Hofmann-Kurada in her translator’s note, “is clearly addressed to a Japanese readership. In many ways the book is about the Japanese language itself.” As a result, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the actual matter of the essays—Tawada’s discussion of familiarity, understanding, and ignorance—and the writing’s sensibilities, associations, and perspectives, out of which its […]

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Canterbury Chronicles: “Mercy” by Joan Silber

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Working through the morass of new fiction can be just that. The established names come and go—Pynchon, McEwan—perhaps not talking of Michelangelo, but somehow commodified, even when the authors are assiduously avoiding it. All the more reason to appreciate the subtleties of Joan Silber’s work. Her latest novel, Mercy (Counterpoint; 256 pages), manages to be at once a street-smart account of the perils of shooting heroin as a party game among East Village friends and a Canterbury Tales of a carefully constructed set of characters whose paths cross in seemingly coincidental (but non-Dickensian) ways. The connections depicted, and their consequences, […]

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Prizing Possibility Over All: ‘A Toast to St Martirià’ by Albert Serra

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Encompassing moviemaking, personal history, and a defense of individual freedoms, Albert Serra’s spirited and opinionated manifesto A Toast to St Martirià (144 pages; Coffee House Press) pays tribute to the filmmaker’s hometown of Banyoles in northeastern Catalonia. Given as a public talk at the small town’s annual festival celebrating its patron saint, Serra’s speech (translated from the Catalan by Matthew Tree) reveals the surprising ways in which his trajectory has been determined by his humble place of origin. From the outset, the director focuses on locality, reveling in Banyoles’s valuation of emotional connection in contrast to the “nervous living” of […]

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