Category: Book Reviews

The Boy Is a Time Bomb: ‘Saint the Terrifying’ by Joshua Mohr

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I live a quiet life. Wife, family, gym membership—the whole catastrophe. But Joshua Mohr’s latest, Saint the Terrifying (290 pages; The Unnamed Press) offers me—and you, Dear Reader—a day-pass to a world of pain, glory, lust, and limitlessness. It’s a picaresque account of a West Oakland punk rocker on a mission from God (make that Scandinavian deities) to find out who’s been stealing the gear from his starving musician buddies and make them pay for their sins, bigly. At story’s outset, the one-eyed title character is recovering from the death of his alcoholic mother, who had a habit of dancing […]

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‘Bad’ Women: ‘Shame on You’ by Melissa Petro

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“Brown,” as in Brené Brown, is mentioned forty-two times in Melissa Petro’s investigative memoir, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (288 pages; Putnam). It’s not surprising. Few people are as connected with studying shame as Brown, whose 2011 TED talk “The power of vulnerability” and subsequent books catalyzed an anti-shame movement. Yet shame, as Petro states, “remains no less pervasive today than it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago.”  Seven out of ten teenage girls are ashamed of their bodies; seventy-five percent of executive women feel imposter syndrome; three out of […]

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In the Time of COVID: ‘A Journal of the Plague Years: Words and Music from the Lost Days’

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Capturing the “decisive moment,’’ in Cartier-Bresson’s phrase, has always been a perilous project, made more so in these dizzying times of social media, constant disinformation, and attention spans as fleeting as the latest app or iPhone upgrade. All the more impressive then, when writers, and editors, take the time for a more considered look at once-shattering events that have been too quickly forgotten. Such is the case with A Journal of the Plague Years: Words & Music from the Lost Days (289 pages; Blue Books). A spinoff from an online website offering takes on the immediate and long-term impact of […]

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What Was Lost Still Remains: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak

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How is a goddess erased from history? What can be done to reinstate her? In her stunning new novel, Elif Shafak ponders these questions in reference to Nisaba, the ancient Sumerian goddess of writing. There Are Rivers in the Sky (464 pages; Knopf) is profound and multi-layered, braiding three distinct stories that eventually merge to form the narrative, like tributaries forming a single river. The tale begins with a single raindrop that falls from the sky onto the beard of King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh, who assembled an impressive library that included a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh etched onto […]

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Pet Project: ‘We’ll Prescribe You a Cat’ by Syou Ishida

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Syou Ishida’s amusing but poignant novel-in-stories, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat (translated by E. Madison Shimoda; 304 pages; Berkley) takes place in the fictional Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul in Kyoto. The Japanese clinic’s office on the fifth floor of a building seems to exist in a magical, liminal space, since it doesn’t show up on a phone navigation map or have a numbered street address. Rather, knowledge of the clinic is passed by word of mouth, and the office can be discovered only by those who are truly ready, at that moment, for a cat prescription. Many of […]

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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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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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Close quarters: ‘Blue Ruin’ by Hari Kunzru

by Olivia Kane

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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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