She marshals scientific, intellectual, literary, and journalistic resources to document how climate change has impacted our world on multiple levels. Her book is a very honest appraisal of both the changes we have wrought and the challenges that we and our children must face.
As a collagist, Fincke’s medium is the paragraph, each seldom exceeding a dozen lines, demarcated by white space, and, more often than not, set off by a simple title as though each paragraph begins a new chapter. In many cases each paratactic paragraph flies in a different direction than the last.
Aguilar Camín varnishes his sentences with great perceptiveness and lyrical grace, and there is an almost effortless beauty and tremendous sensitivity to his prose, which makes reading his work particularly gratifying. Transporting the reader to places like Asturias and Mexico City to retrace the origins of his parents and grandparents, he invokes artistic license to depict not merely the locales but also their impressions of the place.
These sixty-four brief, carefully wrought essays center on the writer’s mother’s battle with cancer and on Babine’s use of cooking as a tool to cope. When her mother gets sick, Babine begins a delightful, quirky search to collect cookware—specifically colorful, vintage Le Creuset pieces that she gives names like Estelle and Agnes and Penelope Pumpkin.
Photo by Boston Public Library Dedicated to the memory of Gordon Smith The story comes in pieces, and you must think and weigh and assess and form your own impressions. Reserve judgment. Imagine other possibilities. Listen. You must delete from your memory that which was stricken from the record, which called for speculation, which […]
On Contemporary Art isn’t a critique of its subject but a discussion of its situation. Today, the idea of demarcating artistic movements has faded; after a century of artists, academics and critics culturally categorizing every new wave (die Brücke, de Stijl, Postimpressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and so on), Aira declares “the carnival of names [has] been shut down” and replaced by an empty, auction house-approved label.
Morales is able to string these eclectic stories together into a larger narrative, making the collection surprisingly cohesive and more like a book-length memoir than an essay collection.
The poems and prose in Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light thus delve into Babbitt’s passion for illuminated manuscripts, his confessed object of reverence.
Then, on October 8, a bubble cone began to rise from the earth at one corner of the village. Cracks appeared in fields. The resident administrator to the United Kingdom watched as a cluster of grazing sheep fell into the earth, and, a minute later, the earth seamed itself together, eating the sheep. This, he believed, was the start of a new volcano. He radioed the Royal Navy for help, and a ship set off from Cape Town to help evacuate the islanders. That night, residents camped in tents, as far from the volcanic activity as they could go on the small island. The air was wet with drizzle.
Even within the Indigenous community, identity is a contentious topic, with reasons rooted in a history of attempted erasure. And yet, Indigenous literature is in itself a political act of resistance to those efforts.