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.
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.
MONIKA CASSEL
The speaker’s father, deployed to Vietnam in 1970 (the year of the dog in the lunar calendar) becomes a central figure between these grieving, unsilenceable women, but he is reticent, seen most vividly when the speaker, a child, watches as he sleeps to make sure he doesn’t choke on his tongue from seizures resulting from his service.
AIDAN COOPER
A duck paddling in a pond is a memorial to the passage of time; winter snow doesn’t represent death nor sleep, but rather life at its most ferocious. With Cather, the world is flush with a force so powerful it can’t be predicted or contracted or even known, only guessed at and trusted in. A magic rushes from every stream, from every hog’s bark.
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