By DAVID MCGLYNN
Review by NICOLE SCHRAG
David McGlynn’s new novel-in-stories unfolds on and around the campus of the fictional Buchanan College in Hanover, Wisconsin, a school not unlike McGlynn’s home institution of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Liberal Arts follows the lives of professors and students, alumni, community members, and friends and relations of all of the above over the course of four academic years.
By BRAIS LAMELA
Review by ZARA KARSCHAY
It is 1939. Spain is emerging bruised and broken from its Civil War as a plaything for Franco’s crushing rule. People are hungry. The country’s agriculture and rail networks are in shambles. Citizens go where the work is, leaving expanses of rural land unpopulated. Intending to reform Spain’s agrarian economy and redistribute the population across the country, the regime’s “New Colonization” policy (la nueva politica de colonización) draws up plans for several hundred new settlements to be built across the whole of Spain. Some move voluntarily, others are forced to do so, because their own villages are submerged to create water reservoirs. Over three decades, more than fifty-thousand people are displaced.
By QIAN ZHONGSHU
Review by BEN TAMBURRI
Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged takes its namesake and epigraph from a French proverb: “Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.” The proverb foretells much about this acerbic novel, as its protagonist, Fang Hung-Chien, stumbles into and out of the lives of various women in Shanghai after returning from his years studying abroad in Europe.
By WYATT TOWNLEY
Review by AIDAN COOPER
Since it first found me in The Common’s Issue 28, I’ve been hypnotized by Wyatt Townley’s “Wedding Vows.” “Falling is an art,” she says, “we have fallen all the way here.” The poem delights in the homology of movement among everything twirling in the world. And now, in Townley’s latest book of poems, Making the Turn, “Wedding Vows” takes on a whole new twirling world to enjoy. In her fifth poetry collection, falling is an art that constantly recurs, redirects, and finds in the force of moving some give in gravity itself. You can fall forever and in any direction; every instance of being is always in flux. Townley writes, “as word by word you are led / to where you are now standing.”
By LIZ JOHNSTON and EOGHAN WALLS
Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU
It’s hard to fight for other organisms and remain on speaking terms with humanity. People don’t care about extinction. What’s one species, they say, compared to my precious convenience? Trees and birds do their bit for the ecosystem merely by existing. Humans are uniquely selfish and destructive. Come to think of it, maybe we’re the expendable species.
Two timely new novels, The Fall-Down Effect, Canadian writer and Brick magazine editor Liz Johnston’s debut, and Field Notes from an Extinction by Northern Irish poet and novelist Eoghan Walls, center on those who risk their lives—and other people’s—for nature. Both books ask what makes a person willing to go that far. Nature? Nurture? What’s the tipping point? Why now?
The protagonists in these books have suffered family traumas that harden them to distractions like love, and they share reclusive personalities, as well as a mix of megalomania and desperation. The Fall-Down Effect’s protagonist says: Enough thinking. Now. The main character of Field Notes says: A species is dying. The world needs to know.
Review by ASHLEY HONEYSETT
The Voice of Blood cover
The short story collection The Voice of Blood is the first book by Mexican writer Gabriela Rábago Palafox to be translated into English, 35 years after its original publication. Rábago Palafox achieved some recognition in Mexico, winning a number of awards including the prestigious Puebla prize, but was not widely recognized in her lifetime. Interviews and biographical information are limited. The blurbs on the book refer to her as “the secret ‘cool aunt’ of a few Mexican writers,” and say that her work was almost impossible to find. She wanted an international readership, which her translators say was an unorthodox ambition in Mexico, which had insular, nationalistic literary and publication traditions. They speculate that, had she lived, her star would have continued to rise. But Rábago Palafox died in 1995, at age 47.
Review by SAM SPRATFORD
Book by EMMELIE PROPHÈTE
Translated from the French by AIDAN ROONEY
Uncle Frédo lies in the dark, water dripping through the sheet-metal roof. His American Dream crushed by the reality of existence as a non-white, non-citizen in the U.S., he returns to Haiti for the remainder of his life. He rarely speaks and is nearly always drunk. He spends his days in a dreamless twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness.
Cécé, his 20 year old niece and the inheritor of his psychic burden, is our real protagonist.
Cécé was born into a slum outside Port-au-Prince, a place fractured by violence. It is the recent past, in the heady early days of the digital age. Facebook was still the social platform of choice and capitalism had not yet made an industry of influencer marketing. Abandoned by a kleptocratic state, the Cité of Divine Power and its counterpart, Bethlehem, have seen gangs step in to provide structure for residents by claiming a monopoly on violence. Unlike the Hobbesian Leviathan, there is no law underwriting the circumstances under which violence can be applied. It is a lawless place—but not without an order of its own.
By JULIANA LEITE
Translated by ZOË PERRY
Reviewed by JAY BOSS RUBIN
In the opening chapter of this subtle epic, the centenarian narrator Natalia confides: “At this point in life, I’d say that going on forever or for too long is a bad decision, a very bad one; what’s nice is to exist and then stop existing, to exist for a while and then be able to change the subject.” In other words, if the transition between life and death is an abrupt one, then so be it. “[L]et’s be done with it,” she says, “though it would be nice to have the time to spritz on some perfume beforehand.”
When I first encountered this sentiment in Juliana Leite’s Exemplary Humans, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, I took it be a bit of a bluff. It reminded me of a bumper sticker I saw a couple of years ago in Portland, Oregon, that read: “I ♥ AGING & DYING” (which I interpreted as an existentialist rejoinder to proclamations of commercial allegiance—“I ♥ Mr Plywood” and so on—so common in my hometown). But by the end of Leite’s novel, which takes place primarily in Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis, Brazil, and spans that country’s lengthy dictatorship, I was convinced that Natalia’s breezy acceptance of her own mortality was absolutely serious. It is not only possible, but strongly advised to love aging and dying. It isn’t easy, though. To transcend dread, and transform it into something more palatable, a unique kind of emotional intelligence is required, and so is a talent for adjusting one’s perspectives. Natalia is the novel’s exemplar of both these qualities.
Curated by KEI LIM
This month, JULIET MCSHANNON, RO SKELTON, and TERESE SVOBODA review books that center personal and political hardships. They carefully consider the responsibility and care of writing about real people, the act of research in representation, and how writing can function as an agent of change.
Many fiction writers aspire to mastery of the short story form. From commercial offerings such as the “MasterClass” online series to college curricula, we are taught techniques to create a strong character and a plot leading to a resolution. The goal? “To uncover a single incidence or series of linked incidents, aiming to evoke a single effect or mood from the reader,” as phrased by Sughnen Yongo writing for Forbes. I’m convinced that this conventional attitude that expects singleness from the short story is selling it short.
In his latest collection Stories from the Edge of the Sea, Andrew Lam delivers work far beyond that narrow definition of the form. The settings are complex. Even a five-page story can encompass several decades of a character’s life. Though many pieces focus on a single protagonist, often the cast of characters is big enough for a multigenerational saga. 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.
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