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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”

I was lucky enough to get an advance readers copy of this book from Feminist Press — I follow them on Instagram (their feed is awesome) and they asked if any reviewers or booksellers or bookstagrammers wanted one, and I asked and they sent me one! I was so excited!! I read it immediately, whichContinueContinue reading “Enjoy me among my ruins, Juniper Fitzgerald”

I am very behind on posting, but in the meantime, here’s a review of Jenny Croft’s translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob that I wrote for the Asymptote blog! I wrote an academic essay about the novel a year ago, thinking about it in relation to her other novel, Flights, and how both ofContinueContinue reading “Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk”

One of the first books that I read this year was Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which is every bit as incredible as people say, a marvelously intimate and absolutely immersive history that is also a powerful work of theory that argues that young Black women in 20th century America were radicals dreaming ofContinueContinue reading “Generations, by Lucille Clifton”

I finished this a few weeks ago, and have been thinking about it off and on ever since. Like so many of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels, it’s a book that seems deeply strange, and yet, the more I think about it, the harder I find to explain why. I was tempted to say that it hasContinueContinue reading “at freddie’s, Penelope Fitzgerald”

One of the (very) few contemporary novels that actually lives up to its hype. A reviewer on goodreads complained that it took too many liberties, and didn’t really do justice to the real Marie de France, and that seems like a fair critique, but fortunately, I don’t know that much about Marie De France, soContinueContinue reading “Matrix, Lauren Groff”

A few years into my first job, someone put a copy of Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks into my hands. It was a revelation. The first few chapters are all about writing anxiety, and how to deal with it (by writing a little bit every day). I was thunderstruck toContinueContinue reading “On academic writing”

I spend probably too much time pondering the difference between personal essay and criticism and non-fiction and auto-theory, so there was something kind of pleasing about reading something that was so squarely in the category of personal essays. This is a person writing about her experiences. She writes about her father’s hospitalization in Greece asContinueContinue reading “Notes to Self, Emilie Pine”

I read Beauty Salon, translated by Kurt Hollander, for the first time in 2015, on the recommendation of a friend, and was riveted by it. I don’t re-read things often, but I decidedly wanted to revisit this, and so I was very excited to hear that Deep Vellum was releasing a new translation, done byContinueContinue reading “Beauty Salon, Mario Bellatin”