Category Archives: Uncategorized

This book was fascinating to me, because it approached a topic that I have read a fair amount about — second-generation memories of the Holocaust — from a perspective that was totally new to me, that of an Israeli Jew traveling to his family’s village in Poland. This is a protagonist for whom Poland isContinueContinue reading “Poland, a Green Land, by Aharon Appelfeld, tr. Stuart Schoffman”

I heard about this book from one of my favorite Substacks, The Biblioracle Recommends, by John Warner. It was in a post of Pulitzer Prize predictions (sidenote: these turn out to be very fun to read, because the awards are often curveballs, and totally shrouded in secrecy, so the guesses have to be broad), andContinueContinue reading “Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel”

It seems impossible that Beckett didn’t read this slender, strange text, but I have no idea if he actually did (a brief internet search only reveals that other people have compared the two). It’s a semi-comic, semi-melancholic story of two men who are trying to go up a mountain, told mostly through dialogue, and itContinueContinue reading “The 210th Day, Natsume Sōseki”

I read this book awhile ago when the author came to speak at Cornell, and enjoyed it so much that I made my book club read it, and therefore reread it myself last week. What I think is so cool about it is that it combines three related genres — the coming of age story,ContinueContinue reading “Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, Bushra Rehman”

I may be somewhat biased, because Raul is my colleague and I like him a lot, but I enjoyed this novel so much. It’s the story of a guy named Hugo who lives in Miami and works as a spiritualist without really believing in what he practices, and who is being eaten away by debt,ContinueContinue reading “A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, Raul Palma”

Some time ago, I read The Marzipan Pig with my 6yo, and absolutely LOVED it. I read it over and over, and read passages out loud to my partner, and when I posted about my love for it on facebook, and my intention to track down all of his other books,* people mentioned that heContinueContinue reading “Her Name was Lola, Russell Hoban”

I discovered the existence of this book when, before class, I was hastily googling to find the page number in Maus where Spiegelman mentions his daughter’s birth in a footnote. I found it, but I also found something entirely unexpected: her book! I glanced through some reviews that reassured me that this was not justContinueContinue reading “I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, Nadja Spiegelman”

Recommended to me by one of my students, this book was so lovely. A boy and his mother read each other fairy tales — for her, they trigger memories of being a refugee, for him, of his crush on a boy at school. Meanwhile, she worries about her mother in Vietnam, and he worries aboutContinueContinue reading “The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen”

This moved up on my to-read list after I heard a terrific lecture by my colleague Zohre Soltani on the visual iconography of the Azadi Tower over the years. The book is a collection of comics about contemporary Iran — the protests, the crimes of the State, life among the diaspora. A few pieces alsoContinueContinue reading “Woman, Life, Freedom, edited by Marjane Satrapi”

I happened to be reading these two books at the same time, and though they’re very different from each other, there’s a lot they have in common, not least of which is sheer charisma. Both authors just seem incredibly badass and cool. But they also further fed my ongoing rumination on the essay form, andContinueContinue reading “Creep, by Myriam Gurba & The Utopia of Rules, by David Graeber”