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Massachusetts Reviews: Girl, World

November 2, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

Girl, World by Alex Poppe (Laughing Fire Press, 2017)

For better or for worse, “feminism” is in fashion. Spunky shirts proclaiming feminist slogans have become mass-market staples, allowing anyone (who can afford it) to “try on” feminism in a dressing room. Celebrity feminists tweet one-line proclamations to show their support of the movement—while generally directing their activism toward a palatable, majority-defined “woman”: often white, often cis-gendered, often able-bodied, often American. This sleek, whitewashed, marketable version of feminism is having its heyday while—beyond the...

MASSACHUSETTS REVIEWS: The Year 200

August 21, 2017 - By Beth Derr

The Year 200 by Augustín de Rojas (Restless Books, 2016)

Cuban author Agustin de Rojas's The Year 200 forces American readers to grapple with their assumptions about Cuba, communism, and the human condition. The novel's Spanish publication in 1990 and English publication in 2016 line up with potentially crucial turning points in the U.S.'s perception of socialist societies. While technically the conclusion of a trilogy, Nick Caistor and Hebe Powell's English translation of The Year 200 stands on its own as a mindbending challenge to economic and philosophical ideologies.

MASSACHUSETTS REVIEWS: Structure, Sign, and Play

August 8, 2017 - By Michael Thurston

Double Portrait by Brittany Perham (Norton, 2017)

So What So That by Marjorie Welish (Coffee House, 2016)

As Robert Lowell saw...

Massachusetts Reviews: Orion on the Dunes

July 24, 2017 - By Catherine Staples

Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston by Daniel G. Payne (David R. Godine, 2016)

Within the protected lands of the Cape Cod National Seashore, in the small salt-box cottage we rent each summer, you step outside into a place that is simply itself. Chickadees cross above you, wind makes paths through crowns of oak and beech. The cottage—in the hold of scrub pine and sea wind—owes no small debt to writer and naturalist Henry Beston, whose magnificent book The...

Migration and Gender: A Review of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Penguin, 2017)

May 3, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

Responding to the shocking reality of the recent US election, Aleksandar Hemon wrote in the Village Voice, “For me, the symptom of that experience is a constant traumatic alertness, a terrible, exhausting need to pay attention to everything and everybody and not succumb to the temptation of comforting interpretation . . .Trauma makes everything abnormal, but the upside is that living with and in a mind where nothing appears normal or stable is the best antidote to normalization.” Hemon’s next project, with the Bosnian Canadian photographer Velibor Božović, will tell the story of immigrants who fled genocide and war in Bosnia; it has been awarded the 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.

The author’s speculations about the...