Contributor: H.L. Onstad

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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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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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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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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