All posts tagged: reviews

Friday Reads: February 2022

Curated by ELLY HONG

This round of Friday Reads features recommendations from three of our online contributors: Carolyn Oliver, author of “Magic Mile;” Rajosik Mitra, author of “Cockroach;” and Jennifer Shyue, translator of “The Eclipse” and author of “Mother’s Tongue.” Their recommendations include two stunning poetry collections and a graphic novel classic.

Recommendations: Pigeon by Karen Solie, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, and The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández, translated by Robin Myers

Friday Reads: February 2022
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Friday Reads: January 2022

Curated by ELLY HONG

This round of Friday Reads features recommendations from two of our online contributors: Jane McCafferty, author of “These Winters in Pittsburgh are Making Us Strong,” and Emma Ferguson, translator of poetry by Esther Ramón. The memoirs they recommend provide a window into the lives of two dynamic and extraordinary women.

Recommendations: I AM I AM I AM: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell and What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché

Friday Reads: January 2022
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Review: What Isn’t Remembered by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Story collection by KRISTINA GORCHEVA-NEWBERRY

Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU

Cover Page for What Isn't Remembered, by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry. The book cover has a scene of a lighthouse near the water, with a blocky and colorful art style.

There are two Russias in Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s passionate and accomplished debut short-story collection, What Isn’t Remembered, winner of the 2021 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. The geographical country, where many of the stories take place, and the mental state of Russianness, which characters carry with them in the diaspora. There is also America, an alluring, often disappointing exile—and there are Americans, mostly well-meaning, who struggle to live with their mercurial Russian lovers, spouses, friends, or children, whose Russianness comprises the psychic ramifications of political and historical traumas going back multiple generations—World War II, Soviet rule, the chaotic break-up of the USSR, or the Armenian genocide, to name a few.

Review: What Isn’t Remembered by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
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Friday Reads: November 2021

Curated by ELLY HONG

 

This month’s round of Friday Reads features recommendations that span place and time: from interwar Greece to eighteenth-century London to a small-holding in present day Ireland. Read on to see what our Issue 22 contributors have been enjoying.

Recommendations: The Third Wedding by Costas Taktsis, The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon, Please by Christopher Meredith, Trivia: Or the Art of Walking the Streets of London by John Gay, and Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth

Friday Reads: November 2021
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Review: All Morning the Crows by Meg Kearney

Book by MEG KEARNEY

Review by HOWARD LEVY

All Morning the Crows
There are books of poems that in their creation seem, for the poet, to rise out of a sheaf like an oasis, something unknown, unmapped, to be discovered in all its vivifying magic. Then there are books of poems that the poet always seemed to know the map to, where a central insight or trope allowed the book to unscroll itself in the poet’s tongue and brain and heart.

Review: All Morning the Crows by Meg Kearney
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Friday Reads: October 2021

Curated by ELLY HONG

For this October round of Friday Reads, we spoke with two members of our volunteer reading team. Their recommendations feature two portrayals of California that dig beneath the sunshine and glamor often associated with the state.

Recommendations: When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain and Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz

Friday Reads: October 2021
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Review: Insomnia by John Kinsella

Book by JOHN KINSELLA
Review by NICHOLAS BIRNS

Cover of Insomnia by John Kinsella

Insomnia, the latest of the many volumes of poetry John Kinsella has published, is one of his strongest collections of the past decade. Kinsella is an Australian poet, now in his late fifties, who is at once one of the most widely recognized figures in contemporary poetry yet still too little known in some literary quarters. He is abundantly and buoyantly prolific, both on his own and with collaborators of many backgrounds and affiliations. He is at once committed to experimental, avant-garde styles and to a decolonizing, anti-racist, in his words ‘vegan anarchist’ politics. There is a third commitment that nestles aside these two, although less trumpeted: a participation in a lyric tradition and a lyric kind of ‘truth,’ the manifold, irreducible, unformalizable sort of truth Goethe (who would have enjoyed the poems in Insomnia placed in Tübingen) imagined when he spoke of Dichtung und Wahrheit (poetry and truth).

Review: Insomnia by John Kinsella
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Friday Reads: August 2021

Curated by ELLY HONG

For our August round of Friday Reads, we spoke to three alums of The Common’s Literary Publishing Internship. Their recommendations delve into trauma, failure, and purposelessness, but all include notes of hope.

Friday Reads: August 2021
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Friday Reads: July 2021

Curated by ELLY HONG

In our July edition of Friday Reads, two TC interns and one volunteer reader recommend transportive summer reading, ranging from a novel about a trip to Greece to a good old-fashioned western. Read onward for discussions of a braided Faulkner novel, a flâneur novelist, and two cowboys down on their luck.

Recommendations: If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by William Faulkner, Outline by Rachel Cusk, Hanging Woman Creek by Louis L’Amour.

Friday Reads: July 2021
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May 2021 Friday Reads: Issue 21 Contributors

Curated by ISABEL MEYERS

We’re celebrating a successful spring issue launch by showcasing book recommendations from our Issue 21 contributors. Their picks, which range from a poetry collection exploring Latino identity to a memoir documenting incarceration in the 1850s, are diverse in form yet collectively poignant and timely. Make sure to read the April installment of Friday Reads, featuring more picks from our Issue 21 contributors, and pick up a copy of the spring issue.

May 2021 Friday Reads: Issue 21 Contributors
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