Review by Jordan Anderson

In Marcus's assessment, “Last Kind Word Blues” represents of the degree to which America inadvertently tends to cut its own mythology from the cloth of a deeply oppressed underclass that shares little resemblance to the “respectable” status quo. Akin to the lost-by-history legend of blues musician Robert Johnson, who left behind as little historical trace as possible, Wiley and Thomas were obscure blues artists who created songs for Paramount Records, a label notorious, Marcus notes, for the poor quality of their recordings (the label was begun as a sideline by a furniture company to sell records for the gramophones they hawked to customers). It is in the near-total obscurity of Wiley and Thomas that Marcus finds a sort of counterpoint to America as it would like to see itself . . .

Review by Jordan Anderson

This paradox of memory and denial poses a unique problem to artists. They often explore regions of empathy avoided by other sectors of culture, and so they venture furthest into the capacity for empathy with those “forgotten” by society. As such, those artists may have the most profound influence on the moral understanding of our age. By this measure, Naja Marie Aidt undeniably approaches the realm of great artists. Her work, as demonstrated in the recent publication of her short-story collection Baboon, shows the author to be concerned primarily with the use of empathy in its most unromantic form: with people as they are rather than as we would wish them to be . . .

Review by Jordan Anderson

Ágota Kristóf’s writing is marked by a sense of upheaval and sparseness that she endured for much of her life as an exile of both country and of language. Cementing her identity as an outsider, Kristóf would earn success in both her adopted homeland and her adopted tongue, publishing her first novel The Notebook after years of small-scale writing. The discipline Kristóf developed on the hard road to stability is everywhere evident both in the refinement of the author's short, elegant sentences and the caustic realism with which she describes the human condition. Her prose and her characters are as hard and precise as steel . . .

Review by Jordan Anderson

Malaparte's The Skin acts on the reader of the present day in much the same way that a vaccine does; in effect, his work introduces an element of immorality in order to ultimately protect the reader against its effects . . .