During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Reviews.”
Read Melinda Misener’s review of Townie by Andre Dubus III, here, and Sarah Malone’s review of NW by Zadie Smith, here.
OLGA ZILBERBOURG
Sometimes, the perspective shifts unexpectedly from one character to another across time and space, and in other stories a first-person narrator’s voice that begins a story disappears and the story continues in the third person, as though looking over the shoulder of the earlier first-person narrator. The emotional effects of these fourteen stories are layered; they leave us with no easy truths, but push us away from stable shores into the stormy seas of human experience.
CASEY WALKER
But don’t misunderstand: these are funny books, not cynical ones, and they are tight and propulsive, not sagging or perambulatory. There’s always a dignity to continuing to pursue your errands, however fruitless. You meet a lot of oddballs along the way, for one.
ELSA LYONS
A book-length essay divided in nine parts, it’s a barrage of generalizations—but generalizations rendered in startlingly precise prose. Concepts that explode into cascades of images. El Laberinto is not a prose poem. But Paz, first and foremost a poet, can’t help but see words the way a poet does.
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