Reviews

Review: The South by Tash Aw

June 23, 2025 Reviews

Book Cover: "The South a novel by Tash Aw" over a river landscape.

Readers familiar with Tash Aw know that the power of Aw’s writing lies in the intricate layering of complex themes, brought to life through nuanced characters. His latest novel, The South, the first of a four-part saga, is no exception. It is an ambitious portrayal of a family navigating profound transformation and the complexities of identity and belonging within Malaysia’s rich and challenging political context of the late 1990s.

Following his grandfather’s passing, sixteen-year-old Jay journeys southward with his family to inspect their inherited failing farm. Blighted trees and drought-stricken fields greet them upon arrival. Told in rotating third- and first-person perspectives over a few weeks, the novel introduces Jay, his mother Sui, and farm manager Fong as they grapple with identity and belonging within fractured family dynamics. The novel, both broad in its scope and delicate in its intimacy, explores the repercussions when personal lives intersect with wider societal currents. It unfolds with a quiet yet remarkable sense of pacing, each moment carefully weighted, drawing the reader deeper into the rich inner lives of its characters.

What We’re Reading: June 2025

June 20, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD and KEI LIM

This month’s recommendations depart to new and old worlds, and explore what we can bring back from them. With CHRISTOPHER AYALA‘s recommendation we find ourselves among magic and aliens alike, with CHRISTY TENDING‘s we return to Mussolini-era Italy, and with MARIAH RIGG‘s we are brought to a climate-ravaged future. Read on to traverse these collections of stories and essays.

Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears; recommended by TC Online Contributor Christopher Ayala

I’ve taken up the habit of hitting independent bookshops wherever I travel and buying the first interesting book I see, eschewing the never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover adage and one-hundred percent judging a book by its cover. Good design suggests to me a deeper, more thoughtful curation on behalf of the press, that a book itself is an art object whose cover is a deep and personal aesthetic representing the work of the writer and the work of the press. This is exactly how I found myself in Tucson Arizona’s Antigone Books, where I was led into Verso Books’ edition of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan.

The cover, a purply-magenta, sideways picture of Izumi Suzuki kind of glam and sitting on a bed, showcases the tonal register of these stories, all of them a vibe-centered, campy exploration of youth and gender amid an urban-set, sci-fi/fantasy where there are aliens, multiple timelines and, as in my favorite story of the collection, “Trial Witch,” cheating partners that, in the midst of their adultery, can be transformed into whatever the new magic user wants them to be. “Trial Witch,” “It’s a Love Psychedelic,” and the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears”—the best three stories, in my opinion—keep centered the absurdity of one’s place in culture and the changes experienced therein. It’s a neat collection in full possession of a psychic undercurrent not dissimilar to cinema like Bruce Kessler’s Simon, King of the Witches and Anna Biller’s more recent The Love Witch. I’ve been into this kind of shit all summer.

The short of it is to say that this collection made me think about how hilarious it is that, once the type of guy who got his music only from standing around basement shows in Boston and Worcester, MA, I’ve now become a thirty-six-year-old man who goes to work and has nothing else to do but spend the money I make there on clothes. Can’t ask for a much more visceral response. So, hang me out to dry, Baby. Turn me into jerky already.

Cover of How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco’s How to Spot a Fascist; recommended by TC Online Contributor Christy Tending

As someone with twenty plus years of direct-action organizing experience, I’m often asked to speak to this current moment, and how I think we should fight back against what is happening in our country. What I often say is that, for better or worse, we have blueprints given to us by activist ancestors who have lived through these eras before and understand the strategy necessary to meet the moment. Reading histories of resistance against totalitarianism, fascism, and military dictatorships can help us to situate ourselves in a larger context.

Umberto Eco’s slim volume, How to Spot a Fascist (I love a slim volume!) is a worthy addition to this canon. Most widely known as a novelist, Eco grew up under Italian fascism during the Mussolini regime and is a thoughtful narrator of how we can discern fascism from other types of totalitarianism, as well as how to properly name fascism when it arrives. His very first essay, “Ur-Fascism,” burned itself into my memory for its point-by-point accounting of our moment. In it, Eco describes Mussolini as an impossible cluster of contradictions that were more about political expediency, manipulation, and effective bluster than an actual vision for the country. He was not, Eco points out, a great thinker; his modus operandi were bombast, hypocrisy, and self-aggrandizement in service of a consolidation of power.

Eco goes on to catalog more qualities that are present across various permutations of fascism. Not all must be present, but “all you need is one of them to be present and a Fascist nebula will begin to coagulate.” In fact, the fascists don’t even necessarily agree with one another. There just has to be enough commonality, sometimes only by transitive property, that they can stomach aligning with one another in service of a similar-enough vision: the consolidation of state power through violent assimilation. According to Eco, the cultural and political symptoms around which fascism coalesces include, but are not limited to, painting dissent as treason, exploiting fear of difference, and stoking an obsession with conspiracy theories. At this point, gentle reader, I threw the book across the room for its witchcraft-adjacent prescience and poured myself another coffee.

Before he concludes the world’s most depressing laundry list, Eco gets in one final burn on the quality of fascist thinking: “Nazi and Fascist scholastic texts were based on poor vocabulary and elementary syntax, the aim being to limit the instruments available to complex and critical reasoning.” And the counter to that—a practice of intellectualism, art, and voracious reading—is one of the ways that we resist.

Eco admits that resistance is not instant. It is a long arc, but this is work that belongs to us. “Freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. Let this be our motto: “Do not forget.”

Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole and Inexplicable Voids; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Mariah Rigg

I currently have a concussion, and reading things, surprisingly, is one of the few things I can manage—so I’ve been doing my best to get through the stacks around my house. Last Friday, I finished Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole and Inexplicable Voids, a genre-defying collection that largely features characters from the Pacific Northwest (and one besotted octopus!).

I tell most people that I’m of the mind that the individual short story is the most perfect of the literary forms (this probably stems from my own self-importance, as short stories are the only thing I’ve successfully completed), while simultaneously being terrified that everyone who looks down their nose at the short story collection is right in thinking that the genre is a catchall for previously published work. Reading Krow’s Sinkhole proved this fear wrong—her work is a testament to the individual short story, and what a short story collection as a whole is capable of.

From the opening story, where a mother narrates the sudden appearance of a child identical to her own son, to a town infested by toxic butterflies, to a couple plotting murder in an attempt to revitalize their marriage, to time traveling philosophers and psychologists and social workers who journey to stop an infection that will lead to the end of humanity, these stories are full of awe, and horror. Characters reappear from previous stories, as in “Nicholas the Bunny,” which follows the identical child of the collection’s opener as he attempts to repopulate the forests of California by summoning grass and trees and bunnies from thin air while serving as a forest firefighter.

As someone who often writes environmentally-focused fiction, I’m always looking for work that recognizes the hopelessness I feel concerning the future of the Earth while also focusing on how (and why) the hell we keep going as our world barrels toward collapse. Krow’s stories don’t sugarcoat, while still managing to be playful. Her characters refuse to lie down in the face of late-stage capitalism’s rapid entropy, continuing to work and hope for a better world. Even when this means death—as it does in the novella, “Outburst,” where a geologist dies in a lahar born from Mount Rainier Park’s Emmons Glacier—there is still a sense of wonder and beauty. There is a resoluteness, for, as Emmons Glacier collapses, destroying much of Washington state, Dr. Andrea Carling does not run. Instead, “She stood up straight, pressing the camera to the window. She let the glacier speak for itself.” She hands the mic over to nature, reinforcing a theme throughout the collection, in which Krow and her characters let nature have the last word.

What We’re Reading: May 2025

May 23, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer months, with their sprawling days, coax us to explore new literary worlds. If you’re not reading Issue 29—which features short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym—these recommendations from its contributors TERESE SVOBODA, NICOLE COOLEY, and BILL COTTER will help to revive the childhood magic of summer reading. Read on to discover poetry and prose titles that give permission, immortalize, and remind us how “fiercely beautiful” words can be.

Molly Giles’ Lifespan and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

Molly Giles’ 2024 memoir, Lifespan or the novel The Swan Book published in 2013 by Alexis Wright? The first is a perfectly wrought, very moving series of flash pieces of a life experienced above, under, around, and on the Golden Gate Bridge. The second is a wildly inventive, messy novel about the love of Australian black swans by a rebellious woman abducted from a swamp to be the wife of the Australian president. I won’t choose.

Giles’ witty and witless voice in Lifespan celebrates each of its brief but gripping narrative sections, from ludicrous encounters with wicked hyper-articulate parents, to equally challenging teenage children, to bad matrimonial choices. She faces alcoholism and we don’t blame her; she’s without a shred of emotional support. Unsentimental in the extreme, the book is a delight. Don’t do it! the reader admonishes, fully aware her own biography would never stand up to such pitiless scrutiny. Examined as daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother through the abiding lens of a determined writer, writing is the one constant. She’s so articulate about the demonic urge to write—“I just want to be able to say what I don’t yet know how to say in a way that says it so well even I understand it”—and fully cognizant that writing is what electrifies a memoir, not the events of a life. “I like the way his big hands look on the steering wheel and I like the way he sings to himself underneath the chatter of the radio,” she describes her father when she’s three, before later painful revelations set in: “The parents in my novel were cruel to their children, two-faced to their friends, casually hateful to each other. They were the parents I knew.” The Golden Gate Bridge links everything, even the consoling late relationship setting sail into the sunset below the bridge. Most memoirs are: Read it and sleep. This one will keep you up.

Alexis Wright’s third novel, The Swan Book, is a brutish dystopian fantasy set in the midst of a worldwide climate crisis. An eccentric European exile from the Climate Wars finds Oblivia hiding in the trunk of a eucalyptus after a gang rape which leaves her mute. Oblivia befriends a huge flock of black swans attracted to their shrinking Northern Australian lake, but is abducted by an ambitious indigenous politician. “He was the lost key. He was post-racial. Possibly even post-Indigenous. His sophistication had been far-flung and heaven sent. Internationally Warren. Post-tyranny politics kind of man.” Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Big Red and the Mechanic, a talking monkey called Rigoletto, and three genies with doctorates who, as bodyguards, come to a bad end, people her narrative. She gets everything almost any Australian girl would ever want: a handsome fairytale prince, wealth, a much-vaunted position in society— but it’s not hers. Oblivia has “a virus lover living in her brain,” meaning her indigenous culture that evokes enormous sensitivity to the ongoing destruction wrought by other cultures. Destroying a climate and destroying a people have parallels. The book reflects the Australian government’s 2007 Intervention, which disastrously changed welfare, support and policing in the Northern Territory, passed in response to child abuse allegations—although none were ever filed. Curse and spell, Wright weaves ancient aboriginal beliefs, swooping and dipping like the swans, with fairytales and ominous “real life,” using time warps and fiercely beautiful language to register the vast environmental and social disaster that we as a people, among all others, are sure to endure.

Monica Youn’s From From; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Nicole Cooley

The book most on my mind right now is Monica Youn’s amazing poetry collection From From, published by Graywolf in 2023, which I taught this month.

We discussed the book in the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation program, in my poetry workshop called “Series, Cycle, Sequence” in which we read and write poems that invoke and trouble the idea of the poetic sequence.

What I love most about the books I teach is when they are permission giving. Youn’s collection gives so much permission. I have now read the book many times, and it continues to be a marvel. The collection offers a wide range of forms, both fixed and invented—including studies, parables, and sonigrams. The poems investigate race and racialized identity and the body through myth and art and personal experience. Many texts and figures scaffold this book: Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Korean films and TV shows, Dr. Seuss, magpies, Crown Prince Sado. A long piece near the end, “In the Passive Voice,” explores anti-Asian hate crimes and the violences of life during the pandemic.

Monica Youn’s poems are vivid and richly imagined. And constantly surprising. In the book’s first poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphae/Sado),” Youn writes: “To mention the Asianness of the figures is also to mention, by implication, the Asianness of the poet. // Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance.”

I love what Monica Youn’s poems reveal and also what they don’t. I love the way this book confronts the reader.

Teaching a book like From From at our current moment feels more important than ever. Higher ed is under attack, immigrants are being deported, and on my own campus, as part of the City University of New York system, students are terrified for their safety and that of their families and friends. More than 168 languages are spoken on our campus. Many of our students are undocumented. Posters about how to keep ICE off campus are being distributed. None of this is distant; it is a close reality for our campus community.

So now the idea of permission—and permission giving—takes on a different valence. Yes, this book gives enormous formal permission, but also I am thinking about something more. Something I learned from talking to my students in class about the book. Monica Youn’s poems give young writers permission to speak about the worlds around them, to write about what matters, to let a poem be a space in which anything can happen.

At this terrible moment in our history and our country, our voices and our truth-telling and our poems mean more than ever. From From is essential reading.

Photos courtesy of Bill Cotter.

Amélie Suard’s Lettres à son mari; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Bill Cotter

One of the perks of laboring in the antiquarian book trade is the occasional opportunity to read something that hasn’t been read in a while. There are plenty of editions of Don Quixote and Fiore di virtù and Shahnameh that appear and reappear in this strange business of buying and selling old books, but now and then something truly forgotten turns up. In the last year several oddballs have come over the transom: an illustrated handbook for servants in royal Kyōto households in 1712; a four-page pamphlet recounting atrocities in Poland-Lithuania in 1561; an eyewitness account of an outbreak of plague in Piacenza in 1486; a book about werewolf attacks near Geneva in 1598. But the one that has really stuck with me is a book of letters, written by a woman upon meeting Voltaire in 1775, when he was almost 78 years old. The letters are all addressed to the writer’s husband. The first begins:

At long last I have reached the goal of my desires, and of my journey: I have seen Monsieur Voltaire. Never could even a vision of Saint Theresa surpass those what the sight of this great man made me feel: I felt I was in the presence of a god; but a god long cherished, adored, to whom I was finally given a chance to reveal my gratitude and my respect. If his genius had not led me to this illusion, his face alone would have: it is impossible to describe the fire of his eyes, nor the grace of his demeanor. What an enchanting smile!

The writer was Amélie Suard, a Paris salonneuse. Suard’s husband’s responses are not recorded, and Suard’s letters may have met with oblivion, too, had she not sought out, in 1802, her great friend, the translator and belletrist Guyonne-Élisabeth-Josèphine Montmorency-Albert-Laval, and asked her to print them. G.É.J-M.A.L, a former dame de palais at the court of Marie Antoinette, had retired to her château in the Yvette River Valley after The Terror, where she set up a handpress and a cabinet of type. Over the next eight years, she singlehandedly printed 17 books, all in very short press runs. One of the last works she printed was her friend Amélie Suard’s letters. Suard goes on to provide a unique glimpse of Voltaire as seen nowhere else, with asides on his generosity of spirit, brilliance, and probity. But Suard is no fool, and starstruck only momentarily— she expresses her wholesale condemnation of Voltaire’s misguided and extemporaneous passions, his loathing of Jews, and his stinking addiction to coffee. G.É.J-M.A.L, for her part, was obliged to stop printing in 1810, when an imperial decree outlawed private presses, bringing to an end one of the most unique printing houses in Europe, without which the letters of Mme. Suard would never have been read again.

Review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser

April 21, 2025 Reviews

By MICHELLE DE KRETSER
Reviewed by AMBER RUTH PAULEN

Cover of Theory & Practice by Michelle de Krester

One of the brilliances of Michelle de Kretser’s newest novel Theory and Practice is how the author lassoes life’s “messy truths” into a neat and slim book. To do so, de Kretser asks many questions at once: How does shame lead to silence? Why write? What to feel when an idol falls from grace? How do you break free from your mother (the Woolfmother included)? How do class and race determine your place in the world? What to do when life doesn’t fit your ideas about it? Additionally, de Kretser remains flexible in form: fiction blends with essayistic, academic, and autobiographical elements. Even the cover of the Australian edition features a young de Kretser, as if to say, this book might be about things that have actually happened. With so much going on, it might seem like the book would fall apart, but it is a concise and searing portrait of what it’s like to be alive in a certain place and time and body.

What We’re Reading: April 2025

April 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring.

Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman

I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.

What We’re Reading: March 2025

March 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

In this special edition of the column, JAY BOSS RUBIN shares a mini review of ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’s Theft, freshly released on Tuesday, March 18. JEANNE BONNER follows him with a novel that bears witness to the modern world from a very different angle, at the close of Nazi rule in France.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; recommended by TC Online Contributor Jay Boss Rubin

The new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, is his first since he received the phone call informing him he’d been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Its titular theft is open to interpretation. The plot turns decisively on an accusation of stealing. Many references to historical thievery are woven into the narrative. But the book’s most unforgettable thefts may be the central characters’ encroachments—those committed and those just contemplated—on one another’s dignity.

What We’re Reading: February 2025

February 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

This month, contributors KATHARINE HALLS, THEA MATTHEWS, and OLGA ZILBERBOURG take your reading lists to Prague, Damascus, and New York City with four poetry and fiction recommendations that are wholly absorbing, in their stories and settings alike.

Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, trans. Paul Wilson; recommended by TC Online Contributor Olga Zilberbourg

A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters

January 28, 2025 Reviews

Reviewed by SAM SPRATFORD

In Proper Imposters, Panhandler Books compiles four novellas from authors who are attuned to the mystical nature of doubles, a timeless form, and who hold them up to the contradictions of our moment, the paradoxes and counterparts on which our societies rest. MAURICIO MONTIEL FIGUEIRAS, JEFF PARKER, CHAYA BHUVANESWAR, AND JASON OCKERT each spin gripping tales of doppelgangers, pairs whose likeness in body or spirit fades in and out of focus. These are stories of concealment, intentional or not, and revelations of often melodramatic proportions. When the authors align these pieces just right, it resembles the dazzling effect of a hall of mirrors. Each author manages, at various times, to pierce through narrative’s typical strictures into the world of dreams, where fantastical images diagnose with overwhelming clarity the ills of our time.

What We’re Reading: January 2025

January 24, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

As we’re finding our footing in 2025 and, in the U.S., shoring up against new political realities, January has been pervaded by a sense of uncertainty. The books our community is reading right now seem to respond to this feeling, in areas of life spanning from assimilation to cooking anxiety. Read on for recommendations from our contributors AFTON MONTGOMERY, HEMA PADHU, and ADRIENNE SU that just might help to stabilize your spirits—or, at the very least, provide some quality distraction.

Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food and Margaret Eby’s You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible; recommended by Issue 28 Poet Adrienne Su

When working on my last book of poems, Peach State (2021), I often wrote my way to the kitchen: writing about a dish made me want to cook it. These days, I’m cooking my way to the proverbial typewriter. I read about food. Then I cook something I’ve read about, and the process nudges me to fill a page.

Review: Kittentits

December 19, 2024 Reviews

By HOLLY WILSON

Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Molly is a badass. Obvious, isn’t it, from the novel’s title? Kittentits. That’s her, Molly. She’s a motherless white ten-year-old kid, living in Calumet City, Michigan. It’s 1992, and she’s obsessed with attending the Chicago World’s Fair, about to open downtown.

Before she gets there, Molly comes to idolize a woman who tried to kill her conjoined twin; runs away from home to Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville; meets an elderly polio patient living inside an iron lung who gives séances; and befriends an African-American ghost boy and artist, Demarcus. Together, Molly and Demarcus hatch a plan of necromancy to commune with the ghosts of their dead mothers. They camp out at the Fair for weeks, waiting for New Year’s Eve to perform the ritual.