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Brenda Shaughnessy’s witty, moving, fiery new collection, So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), takes us into the past. In its longest poem, “Is There Something I Should Know?”, Shaughnessy remembers a world of Simple Minds and Duran Duran songs, where she finds a young woman haunted by the changes in her body, caught in “pubescence’s acrid synthesis”, […]
Read MoreBlack Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space Janna Levin Knopf, 2016; 256pp The romance of the cosmos is the subject of Black Hole Blues. The romance of bodies of unimaginable size colliding and merging darkly and silently in space. Romance, yes — but also the knotty bureaucracy that has hampered and enabled scientists for the […]
Read MoreThe Sellout Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus and Giroux (hardcover) / Picador (paperback), 2015; 304pp Entering the world like the bastard love-child of a Chris Rock routine and a Thomas Pynchon novel, The Sellout is a sensational satire on race relations in the United States. Its outrageous plot, which reintroduces segregation to a forgotten ghetto in Los Angeles County, motors along […]
Read MoreSweet Lamb of Heaven Lydia Millet W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; 256pp Here’s our set-up. After the birth of Anna and Ned’s child, a “ragged, uninvited disruption” enters Anna’s life: she starts to hear voices. Ned is distant — he’d not wanted to go through with the pregnancy anyway — and Anna is left alone to […]
Read MoreThe Light of the World: A Memoir Elizabeth Alexander Grand Central Publishing, 2015; 240pp Elizabeth Alexander‘s lovely, sad memoir is a tale of two thunderbolts. The first: love at first sight — “A torque inside my stomach, the science of love” — between Alexander and her husband-to-be, the Eritrean artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. The second: Ficre’s […]
Read MoreThirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann Random House, 2015; 256pp The first words we read in Colum McCann’s 2015 collection of stories are Wallace Stevens’s: “Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” provides the epigraphs for each of […]
Read MoreThe Face: Cartography of the Void Chris Abani Restless Books, 2016; 96pp What do our faces say about us — and how much of what they say is fair? That’s one of the questions posed by Restless Books’s intriguing new series The Face, in which writers use their own countenances as launchpads into the imaginative stratosphere. […]
Read MoreDays of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin, 2015; 608pp “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” — John Jacobs of Weatherman “The challenge for me… is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem […]
Read MoreThe Danish Girl David Ebershoff Penguin, 2015 (originally published 2000); 304pp The Danish Girl Directed by Tom Hooper UK/US/Belgium, 2015; 119 minutes The eyes have it. In the recent, Academy Award-winning film version of The Danish Girl, Eddie Redmayne’s dazzled, oceanic gaze — coyly averted, abruptly direct — tells a whole story of its own. As Lili, the real-life female […]
Read MoreNegroland: A Memoir Margo Jefferson Pantheon Books, 2015; 256pp If an authentic life is what you seek, you’re basically doomed to phoniness: this is the paradox that makes “authenticity” one of those words that should only ever appear flanked by inverted commas. The desire to be “authentic” necessitates the sort of reflection that destabilizes both subject and object; […]
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