Books
In Conversation
Marlon James with John Domini
Like all Marlon James’s fiction, this novel explores the past—but it goes further back, to medieval Africa, while wholeheartedly embracing fantasy. There are bat-winged monsters and trans-dimensional portals; the book is the first in a trilogy, what the author calls, “an African Games of Thrones.”
Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening
By Zach DavidsonThe quest to deliver on behalf of someone else—alive or dead—shapes Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening. Ginzburg’s novel begins in the wake of World War II, in a fictional Italian village, where the 27-year-old narrator, Elsa, and her mother are returning home from her mother’s doctor appointment.
Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know
By Joseph PeschelClaudia Durastanti may be a new novelist as far as most Americans are concerned, but Strangers I Know is actually the Italian author’s fourth novel, her first to be published in translation in America. Originally published in 2019 as La straniera in Italy, the book was a finalist for the Premio Strega.
Ben Okri & Mónica Ojeda
By Yvonne C. GarrettThese two very different tales share few themes beyond the nascent power of young girls and a characterization of the natural world as essential in understanding our own humanity. Where Booker Prize winner Ben Okri’s (The Famished Road) magically graceful environmental fairy tale is full of light and hope, Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone is rife with gothic body horror and the darkness of the jungle and within ourselves.
John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
By Rod KesslerIn politics, the culture war between the “woke” and the unrelentingly unwoke rages on, and we might count casualties in the results of the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.
In Conversation
Wayne Koestenbaum with Tony Leuzzi
February 22, 2022 marks the release of Ultramarine, the third volume in Wayne Koestenbaum’s trance poem trilogy. This project, which began with The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and continued with Camp Marmalade (2018), is remarkable for many reasons, not least of all for the distinct tonal differences (or: colors) between the respective volumes.
Ned Denny’s B (After Dante)
By John McEwenThe coincidence of the publication of the 2019 Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize winner Ned Denny’s translation B (After Dante) of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and the 700th year since the poet’s death in the autumn of 1321, proves suitably momentous. Coincidental, because Denny embarked on his “long labour” when he was 40, “nel mezzo del cammin” (di nostra vita), six years ago, with no thought of the anniversary; and long before the appropriately medieval and infernal plague conditions in which it has been published, Dante having died of malaria.
Marino Magliani's A Window to Zeewijk
By John DominiA Window to Zeewijk casts a shadow over conventional notions of a novel. The slim text is Magliani’s first in the US, and Emanuele Pettener’s brief introduction terms him “an original, wild author.” What follows certainly bears out the claim: a sly charmer of a fiction, its pleasures delicious but out of the ordinary.
Jami Attenberg’s I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home
By Carissa ChesanekJami Attenberg’s (The Middlesteins) new memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, is sort of a manifesto to the struggling writer. Well, at least it was for me. Each chapter explored the complications of pursuing creativity while getting knocked down in the process, both by the industry and by self-doubt, only to finally achieve some success and wonder what it all really means.
In Conversation
Rachel Rear with Ian MacAllen
By Ian MacAllenStephanie Kupchynsky’s 1991 disappearance from her home in Greece, New York haunted the people of her home town of East Brunswick, New Jersey, a bedroom community about an hour south of Brooklyn. Kupchynsky’s father, Jerry, taught music at the local school. He was beloved by his students, like Rachel Rear, who played the clarinet. Rachel’s mother eventually married Jerry, and she became his stepdaughter and Stephanie’s stepsister. During that time, Stephanie’s disappearance remained unsolved.
