All posts tagged: review

What We’re Reading: July 2025

Curated by KEI LIM

This July, ELIZABETH METZGER, NINA SEMCZUK, and SEÁN CARLSON bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.

Cover of The Lyrics by Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe’s The Lyrics, recommended by Issue 24 Contributor Elizabeth Metzger

It’s early July, and I’m in the middle of moving back to the East Coast. Right now, a few days after the death of the poet Fanny Howe, I am reading her collection The Lyrics, on a screened porch in the late afternoon in the Berkshires, watching geese gather on a tiny red dock. I can hear the voices of parents across the pond teaching their children to fish, to let the fish go. I’m appreciating the element of air as I remember it from childhood, a sort of thickening all around me that feels wearable, welcoming, at times oppressive, a return to an old life from the other side.

I have read Fanny Howe over the years, but when I heard she died a few days ago, in the same summer storm I had slept through while visiting Cambridge, I felt stunned to find myself so close to her poetic landscape, yet still quite far from a sense of her work. After reading several beautiful tributes by poets I admire (Ilya Kaminsky, Katie Peterson, Christina Davis, Ocean Vuong, Kazim Ali, etc.) I stopped in The Grolier to buy one of her books. The Lyrics opens with a multipart poem “Forty Days,” which begins on the summer solstice: “If I can just keep walking / It will not be now/ But next…” Immediately I felt the sense of time becoming the air element, the humidity of East coast summers, how air meets the skin and makes a layer there, not sweat but spirit. The invisible world seems to hold the body for a moment in evidence of something beyond it. In Howe’s work, wandering is necessary for the sacred. Even indecision is momentous and has direction. The spirit is not just within.

The poems in The Lyrics rove toward a knowing that can never entirely be reached: “Where, if I go far enough, will I find a sacred place?” The speaker travels to a monastery (in later poems, to Ireland) and considers her own mystical relation to the word alongside the monks, her own complex experience of being American and the radical reality of being a guest on this Earth. Though I am discovering Howe’s voice in a deeper way only now that she has left the Earth, I find comfort in the way her mind moves, a sort of slow no-nonsense wisdom like the familiar steps of a dead relative coming home. Or is that the memory of steps, the rhythm of my own outer spirit?

The poem ends:

            Call I won’t call back
            Call up into the night:

            “Knower, how is this voice different from the others?”

 The promise of the poet-speaker not answering is a demand to call on her anyway, which is maybe what all great poems call us to do.

The moral imperative here seems one of accepting the inevitable with tenderness while continuing to question everything as precisely as possible. At a season when I myself am moving (returning?) east geographically, a bit spiritually unmoored in my sense of one lifetime (crowded with absence, occasionally wiping beads of uncertainty from some existential brow) I feel in Howe’s poems the honest salty company of a person a few laps ahead of me on the spiritual track: “I was a ghost before I was a tramp.” Howe’s is not the vibrant aliveness I turn to other poets for but a quieter, no less intense, record of living: “I crossed into a landscape / Where everything was finished.”

The last poem of this 2007 collection, “No Sleep,” ends “No sons, no daughters / no poets, no more house.” I am alone reading on the porch of an old world, without my children, those souls I am to love most on earth. What is strangest about this place are the ways in which it is familiar, the ways in which it has continued to thrive all this time without my noticing. This is not just your childhood, the geese scream, this is not even yours exactly, this is life. If there are houses here, they are for others’ sons and daughters. The poems have lost their poets. Summer brings us together around the pond, voices in the same air, nothing more.

Even what empties and decays is something that will happen. Howe doesn’t shy away from this fact: “The fruit tree is pinned to a wall so the fruits / Are less likely to fall. // Fall they will…” She doesn’t bother to include a “but” or “yet” because whatever happens—falling, included—Howe reminds us, is a human act. The fact that we will fail does not contradict our efforts to thrive. All that means survival. We rest in order to remain. We read. What else is summer for?

 

Cover of So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions; recommended by TC Online Contributor Nina Semczuk

What do Olympic losers, dissertations, and clams have in common? Answer: the curious mind of Anelise Chen. This delightful writer, whom I discovered when I was assigned to review her latest book, a hybrid memoir titled Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, has a gift for amalgamating seemingly unconnected topics, anecdotes, and facts; for instance, Charles Darwin’s grandfather’s coat of arms, Georgia O’Keefe, and a certain family of Taiwanese immigrants.

While her work is wonderfully unique, she uses a fragmentary style reminiscent of Jenny Offill, and a way of questioning the world akin to Sheila Heiti—two writers I love, so it’s not surprising that I’ve fallen for Chen. Clam Down is written with a wry sense of humor, and I sought more of it, which brought me to Chen’s backlist, which consists of one book, So Many Olympic Exertions, published in 2017 by Kaya Press.

In So Many Olympic Exertions, the narrator, Athena, is trying to finish her dissertation in American Studies, where she focuses on athletes and motivation. She’s already received an extension, and her deadline is fast approaching when she learns that an ex-boyfriend has died by suicide. In the face of academic and emotional upheaval, Athena returns to swimming, to the familiarity of a pool, having once been a successful child athlete.

She meditates on top-tier athletes, on dedicating one’s body to a sport. Chen writes, “Win or lose, the spectacle is stirring. One can throw oneself confidently down a mountainside, willingly enduring years of training and monotony and hardship and unhappiness for the fulfillment of this one, deeply meaningful goal. If that’s where one has decided meaning lies.” It’s the last sentence that reveals the narrator’s point-of-view, which interrogates how much meaning is placed on the end result; on winning. A number of fragments in So Many Olympic Exertions focus on what happens after winning, after an athlete hits their peak. Unfortunately, it’s almost never good. Athena finds many examples of eating disorders, depression, and suicide.

She also spends time searching the internet for the opposite of winners—quitters. “Giving up in the middle of a game violates a fundamental precept that we’ve all subscribed to. To quit is to protest. Quitters refuse. Quitters say no. Albert Camus: ‘What is a rebel? A man who says no.’”

While the pithy anecdotes from philosophers, athletes, coaches, and thinkers are fascinating and compelling in and of themselves, Athena’s journey is what captured me. Over the course of the novel, she grapples with her former lover’s death, moves back to the West Coast and into her immigrant parents’ home, continues to write, and questions our collective obsession with sports and winning athletes. Both of Chen’s books are ripe for rereading—they’re somehow dense yet also distilled. I can’t wait for more of her work.

 

Cover of This Interim Time by Oona Frawley

Oona Frawley’s This Interim Time; recommended by TC Online Contributor Seán Carlson

No matter how frequent the travels, I still feel a certain haze whenever arriving from the United States into Shannon Airport in the west of Ireland. I trace the land and estuary below as we begin our descent in morning light, then walk the corridors alongside other passengers, regardless of where they call home, all navigating time zones in something of a dream state. Within these halls, I hold memories of coming and going with my parents, and now with my own children.

Here, in the departure lounge, I opened Oona Frawley’s This Interim Time. My family and I had returned to Ireland the previous morning, and after a jetlagged run of errands and hugs and kisses at the front door before work travels, I found myself back at Shannon, alone in transit with Time.

Frawley’s essay collection begins by conceding what it isn’t: the novel that she has tried to write for years modeled off her parents’ departure from Ireland for New York. In allowing for failure in her intended form, she has succeeded instead in crafting a heart-rending meditation on family and friendship from the fruits of her unborn work and the passage of the decade between.

From the vantage of a house owned by her husband’s family along the Atlantic coastline of County Mayo, Frawley writes in the hours while her children sleep. She seizes on the image of a “metal stage make-up box” in her childhood closet in a Manhattan apartment as a frame for understanding her parents as stage actors as well as her father’s “performance of a lifetime.” This refers to the secret of how the ground fell out from under his feet as “insurance agent, happily married, Ireland, 1959” surrounded by family in Sandymount, Dublin only for the couple to start anew in the United States as “servants, caretakers” living in the desolation of Arizona’s desert.

Confronting her father’s dual addictions—first gambling, later drinking—and their consequences for her mother and herself, Frawley revisits memory to anchor her love and affection for each of her parents as she knew them. With precision and tenderness, she flits between their real and imagined pasts, her own bifurcated sense of “home,” the depths of friendships, and a shared dislocation and community found alongside her immigrant neighbors that give way to the grace of day-to-day moments and the profound grief accompanying miscarriage, cancer, and dementia.

As I turned the final page of Time on my return flight to rejoin my family in County Kerry, at our home in the town where my mom was born, I remained suspended by the sheer beauty and sorrow held so consistently in the same breath. Jack Smyth’s arresting cover art sets Frawley’s “orange sun slung low and large in the dusk” over a montage of a silhouette beside a window and the sea, suggesting a portal. In Time, I also see a mirror. Frawley’s reflections on the “seemingly inconsequential” details she holds from the stories her mother passed on to her as a child, and that she in turn carries as a mother watching the ebbs and flows of her own children’s lives, reveal the vastness within the everyday that allows for it, ever so fleeting, to also become timeless. 

What We’re Reading: July 2025
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Review: The South by Tash Aw

By TASH AW
Reviewed by BRITTA STROMEYER

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.

Review: The South by Tash Aw
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What We’re Reading: June 2025

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.

 

Cover of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki

 

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.

What We’re Reading: June 2025
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Review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser

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.

Review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
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What We’re Reading: April 2025

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.

 

portrait of henry james

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: April 2025
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What We’re Reading: March 2025

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. 

 

cover of theft

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: March 2025
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What We’re Reading: February 2025

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 Cover of I Served the King of England

What We’re Reading: February 2025
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A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters

Reviewed by SAM SPRATFORD

Cover of Proper Imposters.
 
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.
A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters
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What We’re Reading: January 2025

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.

 

Cover of "You Gotta Eat". Displays the title in black bubble letters against a periwinkle background, framed by cartoon illustrations of various simple foods.

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.

What We’re Reading: January 2025
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Review: Kittentits

By HOLLY WILSON

Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Kittentits cover.

Molly is a badass. Obvious, isnt it, from the novel’s title? Kittentits. Thats her, Molly. Shes a motherless white ten-year-old kid, living in Calumet City, Michigan. Its 1992, and shes obsessed with attending the Chicago Worlds 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 Chicagos 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 Years Eve to perform the ritual.

Review: Kittentits
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