Reviewed by Spencer Ruchti
Jon Fosse has written repeatedly on suicide, melancholy, excruciating loss, the role or absence of God, and the border between this life and whatever follows. To read his enormous body of work in panorama is to see the frequent exchanges between the living and the dead, but also beautiful white visions as the curtain draws shut. “The whole of Septology is possibly just an instant, a loaded one, a moment of death. When a person dies it is said that one sees life repeated. Septology can maybe read as such a moment,” Fosse has said in an interview…
Reviewed by Noah M. Mintz
The labels of “migrant” and “immigrant” have always been politically charged, but especially so in these times of immense, widespread displacement. “I know we would usually say migrant stories,” the Kampala-born author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi recently said in an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “but I’m moving away from that and using the term expat experiences, because I’ve noticed that when the British are talking about their immigrants in Europe who are now being affected by Brexit, they don’t talk about them as immigrants, they call them expats.” Her stance is not rooted in theory: speaking from her home in Manchester, as one of over 50,000 Ugandan nationals now residing in the United Kingdom, her choice of words is significant. And they underpin her latest book, Let’s Tell This Story Properly, a collection of stories reflecting the experiences of her compatriots both in Manchester and in Uganda…
Reviewed by Joseph Schrieber
A mood, an atmosphere, rises up from the opening pages of Esther Kinsky’s River—a melancholy that unfolds so softly, so insistently that I repeatedly had to remind myself that I was reading words that originally existed in German. I found myself wondering: What would the German feel like in my hands? How would its texture taste, guttural tones against the back of my throat? These are questions that, in their asking, underscore how River is a text to linger in, to touch, to absorb, and recognize one’s self in…
Reviewed by Mark Haber
Put simply: childhood is strange. Countless writers have tried to capture this strangeness, the landscape of novelty that is a child’s world. Such Small Hands, a slim and haunting novel by Andrés Barba, not only succeeds at this but does so in one hundred haunting pages. Each one of these pages is exquisite, and the end result is a perfectly expressed work that transmits the perverse and bizarre experience that is youth, where games signify life and death and where relationships are teased and pushed to the breaking point. Childhood: part fairy tale, part nightmare...
