Monthly Archives: March 2022

Not predictions, because I’m terrible at them (as my attempts last year will show), just some quick thoughts because I did once again scramble to try to see many of the Oscar-nominated movies before the ceremony this year. Though I haven’t seen what I’m fairly confident is the best movie of all the ones nominated,ContinueContinue reading “Oscars 2022 roundup”

Much like their more well-known graphic novel, This One Summer, Skim is an unflinching look at the realities of being a teenager; an open acknowledgment of just how cruel and nasty a lot of it is. But melancholy though it is, there’s also a wonderful sense of tenderness and even nostalgia. I hated being aContinueContinue reading “Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki”

This was actually exactly what I expected it to be. The kind of fragmentary, essayistic effort to understand — in both an intellectual but also a very affective way — a person from the past, that melds with meditations on the self, excavations of illicit memories and ancestral trauma. But the French version, so, aContinueContinue reading “Exposition, Nathalie Léger, tr. Amanda de Marco”

I managed to get my hands on the UK edition of this book last year, but people in the US will soon be able to get the American edition thanks to Deep Vellum Press! I actually finished reading it a few weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten a chance to write about it, and then RussiaContinueContinue reading “Grey Bees, Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk”

I didn’t read Beowulf until graduate school, when I was teaching it (the Heaney translation) in a humanities core course on the epic.* And I loved it. It’s like an anti-epic — a world-weary, melancholic story of about how heroic values are a thing of the past, gone forever, but perhaps also somewhat ruinous evenContinueContinue reading “The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley”