a journal of research & art
Reviewed by Biz Nijdam
Undesirables offers a corrective to our understanding of prewar and wartime Jewish-Muslim relations. The literal picturing of these relationships and visual acknowledgement of the shared humanity of Jews and Muslims complement the historical facts contained within the pages.
Reviewed by Jessie Hennen
The novel begins as Saga awakens to a bystander asking her name, which she cannot recall. She’s lying on a familiar sidewalk in…
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
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.
Reviewed by Chloé Vettier
“I don’t believe in the Amish model. And I don’t believe that the Amish model can solve the challenges of contemporary environmentalism,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in September 2020, after major French political leaders protested the environmental costs of 5G.
Reviewed by Maya Solovej
She was only eleven, but the experience exposed her to the fragile border between the civility of the everyday and the violence of war.
Reviewed by Naheed Patel
[This book] is a sad howl that comes from deep inside the heart of grief, sending a current of anguish down the reader’s spine.
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.
Reviewed by Lucy Popescu
In her latest novel, Daša Drndić interweaves fiction, reality, history, and memory to terrific effect.
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.
Reviewed by Andrei Rogatchevski
Hůlová’s first-person narrative on behalf of a thirty-something female prostitute attempts to establish the image of prostitutes as women of integrity, who provide a service to society by furnishing their clients with “a bit of humanity.”
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.
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.
Reviewed by Mor Sheinbein
Costa’s re-translation highlights her translating powers to both preserve and portray a world that has been left behind by the end of the nineteenth century, whilst highlighting a kind of humor and irony that some might claim to be the definite marker of the cynical twenty-first century.
Reviewed by Alexis Almeida
The language moves unapologetically through various stages of hunger, arriving at resting points rather than states of knowing.
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.
Reviewed by Poupeh Missaghi
The narrative is fluid, perhaps to mirror the nature of migration, the movement and the instability; but also because this is how our memories and histories reach us.
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.”
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.
