Category: Book Reviews

‘The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox’ by Carl Rollyson: A Complex Portrait

by Nessa Ordukhani

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Entrenched in Gothic drama and the history of the American South, William Faulkner’s writing remain a landmark in Modernist fiction. Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner, Faulkner is undeniably a giant of twentieth century literature. However, less well known, perhaps, is the life he led, the conditions he struggled with, and the contradictions of his own self-perception. Despite Faulkner’s aversion to biographies, in The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 (Volume 2), (622 pages; University of Virginia Press), Carl Rollyson, seasoned biographer and Professor Emeritus at The City University of New York, produces a vivid sequel to the first […]

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‘That Was Now, This Is Then’ by Vijay Seshadri: Irreverent Experiments with the Form

by Corinne Leong

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Time seems to have become an alien concept in recent months. In this sense, That Was Now, This Is Then (Graywolf Press; 80 pages), the new collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri, offers an uncanny relevance. It would be difficult to offer a faithful summary of the collection as even in its brevity, the book covers a stunning number of topics: from bereavement and the detriments of modernity to Hegel and robocalls. The poems strikes a rare balance of humor, poignancy, and intellectualism. Seshadri crafts a poetic narrative that obliterates any linear conceptions of time and human experience, armed with […]

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‘Salt Water’ by Josep Pla: A Dive Into the Mediterranean

by Colton Alstatt

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Though Josep Pla earned a reputation as “the most important (and censored) prose writer in twentieth century Catalan literature” for his anti-fascist journalism, the late author admitted regret that his work kept him from fiction writing. In a 1966 preface to the recently re-published Salt Water (464 pages; Archipelago Books), Pla views the collection of connected and ostensibly nonfiction pieces  written in his youth as “evidence of [his] potential, of what [he] might have achieved.” Considering that this  was a lie meant to subvert Franco’s fascist censors, and Pla actually wrote these short stories while in his fifties, Salt Water […]

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‘You Will Love What You Have Killed’ by Kevin Lambert: Rip It Up and Start Again

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

While involved in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley during the Sixties, activist Jack Weinberg became famous for coining the phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”; few novels personify his quote as sharply as You Will Love What You Have Killed (185 pages; Biblioasis International; translated by Donald Winkler), the first novel by Canadian Millennial author Kevin Lambert. The story is set in Chicoutimi, a small French-speaking town in Quebec where children more often than not end up dead at the hands of their elders. On the surface, Chicoutimi is a town that appears like any other—with its glad-handing politicians, […]

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‘The Midnight Library’ by Matt Haig: All That Could Have Been

by Nessa Ordukhani

Posted on by Zack Ravas

There isn’t a single person who hasn’t asked themselves “what could have been.” Regret is as ubiquitous as air and we cannot help but dwell on hypotheticals and possibilities. In Matt Haig’s new novel, The Midnight Library (288 pages; Viking), the reader is invited into a world where regrets and missed chances—the parallel lives that exist should things have turned out differently—can be visited. At the center of Haig’s story is Nora Seed, a woman inundated with remorse. With a dead-end job, a terminated engagement, and a plethora of family issues, Nora can’t seem to get anything right. When she […]

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‘Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror’: A Great Escape

by Cade Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

2020, with all its horrors, may have given Halloween a run for its money this time around. The holiday’s circumstances themselves this year are scary enough to substantiate a scary story—kids stuck at home with parents, or otherwise risking an uptick in COVID-19 transmission by taking part in the festivities. Some who prefer to consume more uplifting content in troubling times may find the book ill-fitted for 2020, but if like me horror is a genre you hold near and dear, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror (Catapult; 289 pages; edited by Lincoln Michel & Nadxieli Nieto) is a […]

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‘Wave If You Can See Me’ by Susan Ludvigson: The Water We Must All Cross

by Corinne Leong

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Susan Ludvigson’s latest poetry collection, Wave If You Can See Me (72 pages; Red Hen Press), written in the wake of her husband’s death from long-term illness, is not a narrative of violent, all-consuming grief nor of its resulting numbness. Rather, it is a quiet depiction of longing and inquiry that waxes and wanes, from the perspective of a woman who has prepared extensively for loss. In its restraint, the collection attempts to answer seemingly ineffable questions: Can we know grief before it touches us? Can we begin to interrogate death if we haven’t inhabited it? Ludvigson’s poems are quiet […]

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‘Leave the World Behind’ by Rumaan Alam: On the Precipice of Disaster

by Nessa Ordukhani

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When Amanda and Clay rent a house in the Hamptons with their kids, Rose and Archie, they expect a pleasant family trip and time away from the city. But before they can fully enjoy their rental home, a late-night knock on the door floods their holiday with a new reality of growing fear and unknowable terror. Standing in the doorway under the cover of darkness are the owners of the rental home, G.H and Ruth Washington, whose surprising arrival they claim is prompted by a widespread blackout in New York City. Unable to connect with news sources, or ascertain any […]

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‘Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize’: The Ties That Bind

by Cade Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Each year, Catapult publishes an anthology of the twelve recipients of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which highlights writers who demonstrate exceptional talent in their first published short stories. In this year’s installment, Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize (240 pages; Catapult), editor Yuka Igarashi’s introduction observes that the un-ignorable presence and impact of money unites the collection. But reading through these stories, it’s hard not to focus, perhaps as a result of the pandemic’s transformation of the ways we socialize, on the stories’ exploration of group dynamics, as well as […]

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‘Antkind’ by Charlie Kaufman: One Very Long Laugh

by Colton Alstatt

Posted on by Zack Ravas

As a screenwriter and director, Charlie Kaufman has won acclaim for movies like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York—but not from film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, the protagonist of Kaufman’s new avant-garde romp, Antkind (705 Pages; Penguin Random House), who, in a meta twist, maligns the author time and again, often before B. is hit by a bicyclist, or buried beneath an avalanche of books, or falls into a manhole. (He does that a lot.). Reading Antkind is a bodily thing, so full is it of gut and heart. For once, the cliché […]

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‘Bestiary’ by K-Ming Chang: Dark of the Mind

by Corinne Leong

Posted on by Zack Ravas

From Plath to Vuong, the poet-novelist has long been a centerpiece of literary conversation, subverting convention to craft impossibly engaging narratives. K-Ming Chang, a poet by precedent, comes prepared to contribute to that legacy. Her first novel, Bestiary (272 Pages; One World/Random House), is suffused with lyricism, a multigenerational, mythological, and magical-realist retelling of one family’s fraught history.  Bestiary’s three narrators are referred to only as Daughter, Mother, and Grandmother. Their narratives are interwoven, and converse and collapse upon each other. Though Chang’s novel is largely lyric and non-linear, its through-line is deceptively simple: Daughter learns the myth of Hu Gu Po—a […]

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‘Just Us: An American Conversation’ by Claudia Rankine: Confronting White Silence

by Cade Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The title of Claudia Rankine’s new collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation (352 pages; Graywolf Press), alludes to a Richard Pryor quote from a 1979 stand-up routine about the criminal justice system: “You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find, just us.” The quote is just as potent now as it was then, with mass incarceration making prisons disproportionately Black, and relevant to Rankine’s stance as she confronts white silence and privilege. But the title also evokes community, a sense of a unified “us,” as well as the more private “us” that exists when we […]

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