A review of Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath (Penn State University Press, 2016) “I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.” —Alice in Wonderland Alzheimer’s disease looms large in the American imagination. The stories and movies follow familiar plots: Parent (or spouse) . . .
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A Review of Yoss’s Super Extra Grande, Translated by David Frye (Restless Books, 2016). If humanity ever makes contact with extraterrestrials, what language will we use to communicate? Musical tones, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? English, Hindi, Spanish, or Chinese? If you’ve read the novel Super Extra Grande by Cuban science fiction writer . . .
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A Review of King of the Gypsies, a short story collection by Lenore Myka (BkMk Press, 2015). In praise of linked story collections, Michael Chabon has said: “A group of linked narratives can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series of snapshots taken over . . .
Read MoreA review of the movie Son of Saul (dir. László Nemes, 2015). The movie Son of Saul, which has received very positive reviews, immerses us in a few days of the life of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were responsible for helping shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers, and for disposing . . .
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A Review of Save Twilight: Selected Poems. New and expanded edition, by Julio Cortázar, Translated by Stephen Kessler. (City Lights, 2016). In “Axolotl,” an early short story by Julio Cortázar, the protagonist watches the titular amphibians very closely, day after day, imagining his way into their consciousness (or lack of consciousness), taking up . . .
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A Review of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel and Grau, 2015). Pirkei Avot (“The Chapters of Our Fathers”), a compendium of rabbinic ethical aphorisms, includes Ben Bag Bag’s prescription for studying Torah: “Turn the Torah over—turn it over for everything is in . . .
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A Review of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). After two years in Jerusalem as a financial journalist and travel columnist during the second Intifada, Aviya Kushner returned to the United States in 2002 to enroll in the MFA . . .
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A Review of Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (Shearsman, 2015). How many poets are there in the world that you go looking for online, checking regularly, even impatiently, to see whether and when their new books will be out? Not many. Among the poets whose work I anxiously await, Donna Stonecipher has long been near the top of . . .
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(Remarks originally delivered as part of a panel celebrating the publication of Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, Yale University Press, 2016.) I was not surprised to hear UMass Provost Katherine Newman, in her opening remarks for this book launch, recall the days when historians told us that abolitionists were . . .
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Martìn Espada’s newest poetry collection entitled Vivas to Those Who Have Failed presents a series of poems that speak to hope and despair, of a world where bullets melt into bells, and of a future in which poets provide spiritual clarity. More concretely, the collection borrows from the elegy and ode, but never fully surrenders to either form, as . . .
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