The American Way: Stories of Invasion
This new short story collection by Comma Press focuses on what the American Way looks like to those at the sharp end of US aggression around the world.
Digging to America by Anne Tyler: Review
In Digging to America, Tyler charts the course of two mismatched families, the hale and hearty, all-American Donaldsons and the quieter, more reticent Iranian-American Yazdans. All they have in common is that they both adopted babies from Korea at the…
Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen
Five chapters. Five narrators. Five different experiences of being young Greenlanders trying to navigate the complex territory of gender and sexual identity. That's the basic setup of Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen, a compelling novel first written and published in Greenlandic…
Nightshade by Annalena McAfee
If you need your fictional characters to be likeable, to be the sort of people that you can "root for", then absolutely do NOT read Nightshade by Annalena McAfee. If, on the other hand, you want characters to be interesting,…
Borges Marathon, Part 3: The Widow Ching—Pirate
Before I read Borges, I used to think there was a sharp dividing line between fiction and nonfiction. In my own writing, there’s a huge gap between the serious, diligently factual articles I write for The Wall Street Journal and…
The Ants Will Come and Tell Me
As the Empire was falling apart, Britain had a problem: how to keep control of all its former colonies and their resources as they became independent. Acting in good faith was, of course, out of the question. Many of the…
The Reality of Anti-Fascism
Reading The US Antifascism Reader lately gave some useful context on this much-maligned but essential movement. It's a collection of essays and speeches by historical figures from W.E.B. Du Bois to Franklin Roosevelt, Aimé Césaire to Barbara Ehrenreich, in which…
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse: German Literature Month 2020
There’s a lot more to the novel than a protest against society’s stifling conventions. In fact, the way that Hesse wrote the book actually undercuts a lot of the angst Harry Haller is experiencing, suggesting that his suffering, although understandable,…
The History of Serbia by Cedomir Antic: Review
This is a useful overview of the history of Serbia, starting in neolithic times and going right through to the present (it was published in 2018). The book starts by describing the early inhabitants of the territory now known as…