Reviews
What I love in books:
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I love books that have an historical angle. Maybe they're set in another era. Maybe they're rediscovered gems. Maybe they're tracing out a problem that seems "unprecedented," but is actually so, so precedented. I love it all.
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I love books that can be described as "haunting," whether due to ghosts, the prose, a focus on memory, or just something unnamable that lingers well after turning the last page.
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I love books that give voice to someone or something previously silenced, whether human or nonhuman. And if that voice is in-your-face unique? *chef's kiss*
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I love books published by smaller presses and/or are works of translation. I also love supporting Chicago and Midwestern authors.
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But: rules were made to be broken! I also love all types of other books! Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to share a forthcoming book.
"Dueling Words in The Extinction of Irena Rey"
Chicago Review of Books
"'Books are books. They’re written by authors. Not readers, not critics, not us.' It’s easy to imagine Croft laughing while writing that line from the perspective of an author who is writing from the perspective of a translator who is translated by another translator. Of course, books are written by translators! The translator’s notes throughout the novel make this point extremely clear. For example, when the author writes, 'Then again, I was a translator. Wasn’t not being me what I spent every day trying to achieve?' the translator responds characteristically bluntly in a footnote, 'No (Trans.).'"
"Leafing through Forests in The Language of Trees"
Chicago Review of Books
"Reading The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape feels like walking through an urban neighborhood during springtime. We stop at each island of nature buffeted by jagged concrete, and we lean in to catch a whisper of gossip passed between gingko leaves and Norway maple leaves. What are they saying to each other, we wonder as we hurry onto the next natural island."
"The Ghosts of Our Mothers in Drawing Breath"
Chicago Review of Books
"Fittingly, Brandeis’ writing is joltingly alive. It rattles and swirls as she meditates on her 'own misdiagnosis of [her mother’s] life.' Like Brandeis in Drawing Breath, her writing dances, desires, births, nurses, creates. It weeps, screams, laughs. Yes, it breathes. And whereas The Art of Misdiagnosis is a confessional exhale, Drawing Breath is a restorative inhale."
"Landscapes of Memory in Dorthe Nors' A Line in the World"
Chicago Review of Books
"She orients herself among dust and dirt, sea and sand, brilliantly capturing specks of memories which dance in the light, however briefly. Like W.G. Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants, who watches dust dance in the projector light, Nors documents how the past haunts the present."
"To and From the Void: On Barbara Molinard's Panics"
Cleveland Review of Books
"Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and, yes, Albert Camus, Molinard is far more concerned with how life itself is inescapably mad—how living means suffering, and suffering means falling into what she calls “the void,” an existential quality that infuses everything in modern life. Religion and reason will not save us; they are mere palliatives, distracting us from questions about mortality we cannot answer."
"Murders for Salvation in Carnality"
Chicago Review of Books
"Sharply translated by Frank Perry, Carnality is the crystallization of Wolff’s years of narrating carnality and its effects. This novel—centered on another pathetic middle-aged Spanish man, a 93-year-old Spanish nun missing a thumb, and a middle-aged Swedish female journalist—answers the central question posed in her previous works: What is the solution to the problems of the flesh?"
"The Red Zone: A Love Story — Chloe Caldwell: Review"
Full Stop
"Snorting at how we’ve been taught to (not) talk about periods — or really, menstrual cycles — is exactly what Caldwell does throughout The Red Zone. By calling out American culture’s redirection of empowered female embodiment into ignorance and shame, Caldwell stages an intervention in what can be called 'American menstrual culture.'”
"A Book is a Machine for Speaking with the Dead"
Rain Taxi Review of Books
"An experimental machine for speaking with her own dead, Samantha Hunt’s first work of nonfiction, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation, deftly takes up the questions at the heart of Edison’s proposed machine, an inspiration Hunt acknowledges: In what ways are life and death the same process, with the dead living in and around us? How do the stories we tell about dying shape our relations with the natural world, our acceptance of multiple truths? How are we haunted?"
"The Ruptures of Maternal Creativity in Linea Nigra"
Chicago Review of Books
"We are beyond thinking of production and reproduction as natural opposites. Just as the Spanish term for childbirth—parto, from partir (to depart)—suggests that each moment of arrival is also a moment of departure, of partition, each moment of not writing is also a moment of writing: the lines birth each other."
"Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Ghostly Poetics of Female Translation"
Hopscotch Translation
"Can translation—conceived of as a ghost haunting one body after another—breathe for the dead? Can translation reveal the dead still breathing, how our breath is made of theirs? For Ní Ghríofa, no breath is singular. Breath is embodied voice, a sign of life which the translator resuscitates for as long as she can, despite knowing she must suspend that breath for it to become text."
