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Literary

677

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Reviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones

Diary of a Young Naturalist brims with curiosity, heartache, and joy. Over the course of a year, Irish teenager and climate activist Dara McAnulty chronicles how the natural world both cushions him from the pains of early adulthood (he turns fifteen) and feeds his determination to protect it for future generations

The Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli

Reviewed by Caroline DeVane

Povinelli situates family stories about place and blood told to her by her grandparents within the broader social narratives of European immigration to the US.

Bees of the Invisible by Maximiliane Donicht

Reviewed by Shoshana Akabas

One hundred years later, German-born poet Maximiliane Donicht picks up where Rilke left off, weaving her own expressive, elegiac verses. I balance on the bottleneck of being.

Boys Quarter by Chukwuma Ndulue

Reviewed by Naomi Falk

Ndulue directs the mind away from imagining stereotypes of times and places and coaxes it towards a sustained patience with language, one that melts the text into the reader.

A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen by Morten Høi Jensen

Reviewed by Marianne Stecher

It is Jensen’s crisp and concise writing and wit, which distinguish his marvelous contextualization of the intellectual, cultural, and social worlds in which Jens Peter Jacobsen moved and breathed. Jensen draws vivid portraits of the nineteenth-century literary contemporaries of Jacobsen – so that they spring from the pages.

Adua by Igiaba Scego

Reviewed by Yasmin Roshanian

Adua dreams of a place where the taboos surrounding sex, romantic idealism, and uninhibited aesthetic pleasures are not censored or damned.

The Outlaw by Jón Gnarr, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith

Reviewed by K.T. Billey

Translated by Lytton Smith, the third and final volume in Gnarr’s autobiographical trilogy is a glimpse into a sensitive, often miserable teenage mind. Devastating candor pulls the reader into the emotional whirlpool of a young thinker as he grapples with normalcy, loneliness, his own limitations, and life’s unexpected possibilities.

Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo

Reviewed by Theophilus Kwek

Throughout the nineteenth century, as the British Empire and its official tongue extended across the world, the word “expatriate,” which, as late as 1818 referred to “one who has been banished,” acquired a new definition: “one who chooses to live abroad.”

Prosopopoeia by Farid Tali

Reviewed by Poupeh Missaghi

Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia is a gorgeous memorial for a lost loved one, from one brother to another, from one man who finds beauty and love in the arms of another man.