The title of Balsam Karam’s novel, The Singularity, is also a description of its formal logic. The book enacts in its plotting, its structure, and its language what happens inside of a black hole, playing out the metaphor across continents, families, and nations. Singularity, Karam explains, brings bodies together in a space of infinite density, […]
An unnamed town with an unnamed narrator are at the center of The Avian Hourglass’s spiraling universe of prose. Starting with chapter 180 and counting down as the narrative progresses, Lindsey Drager’s fourth novel is a surrealist exploration of what it means to move forward in time while exploring the history of ourselves and our […]
In this epic journey through brutalized, fractured communities within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, award-winning writer Mark Jacobs presents an intense and poignant novel of vulnerable outsiders at the peripheries of hell navigating inter-ethnic quarrels, government corruption, and the aftereffects of European imperialism. Jacobs, a former foreign service officer, is a prolific short story […]
Money pervades language. We talk about what our time is worth, whether others will get what they pay for, the cost of our own choices. In literature, too, we speak of the economy of an author’s language. One way to measure a book is to label it a national bestseller, or to gossip about the […]
Aurora Mattia’s first novel, The Fifth Wound, is many books in one. Sarah Gerard calls it “a densely embroidered autofictional mythography,” and Mattia herself has described it as “a scrapbook in the form of a hymn.” The text is filled with literary echoes, pop culture references, and forays into criticism and history that make clear […]
“Ostensibly I write novels and stories,” Danielle Dutton writes at the start of “A Picture Held Us Captive,” the long essay on ekphrastic writing that makes up the third section, “Art,” of her book Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, “yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is […]
When I first read Bojan Louis’s short story collection Sinking Bell, I was an MFA student halfway into a semester-long translation and adaptation course that for me, a short story writer, served as a primer to poetry. It was there that I learned about the opposing but complementary elements of the poetics—sound and form, narrative […]
Photo by Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash 1. Judenfrage We visited my grandmother Roberta once per season while growing up, always in her crowded Brooklyn apartment. It was almost a three-hour drive from our house outside Philly, but my grandmother never smiled when we arrived. Even when her husband was still alive, she sat away from […]
For the people who do not inhabit them, islands have always only represented either a fantasy or a nightmare. Islands are unmoored from the laws and mundane moralities of the continent. That is, to the landlocked imagination, the point of them. This has been true in literature, in works from The Tempest to Joan Didion’s […]
In Absolute Away, Lance Olsen develops three distinct “movements” to structure a novel that takes the reader from Nazi Germany, to Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956, and eventually into a multiverse where the protagonist dissolves into something fluid and intangible. This structural complexity creates a kaleidoscopic view of narrative and language. Discerning up from down […]