culture March 01, 2016

Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor

“Translation requires, and generates, a rare kind of intimacy,” says the narrator of Rachel Cantor’s novel Good on Paper. “Like sex done right, I’ve always thought.… You had to want to get close.”

“Translation requires, and generates, a rare kind of intimacy,” says the narrator of Rachel Cantor’s novel Good on Paper. “Like sex done right, I’ve always thought.… You had to want to get close.” Shira Greene was once a graduate student translating Dante, but she has, at the beginning of the novel, mostly abandoned her literary calling. Convinced that all texts are ultimately untranslatable, and waylaid by divorce and pregnancy, she has veered off track. Now forty-four, she works as a temp and raises her seven-year-old daughter Andi with her gay friend Ahmad, a professor, in his Upper West

culture November 02, 2015

Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe

“At times I’ve thought to myself maybe I have been mad since I was three just as my mother says, and someday if I recover my sanity the phantom tormenting me I call a certain party will disappear.” So says the hospital-bed-ridden narrator of Kenzaburo Oe’s 1972 novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. The amorphous label “a certain party,” ginned up by the narrator’s mother to describe his father—a troubling, enigmatic man, presumably dead—is intended to neutralize and debase him by not naming him. It turns him, in the eyes of the narrator, into “an imaginary figure in a myth or in

culture August 18, 2015

The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel

“I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye,” an unnamed female narrator states at the outset of the new book by the talented Mexican novelist Guadalupe Nettel. The spot, she describes, “stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain.”

“I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye,” an unnamed female narrator states at the outset of Guadalupe Nettel’s autobiographical novel, The Body Where I Was Born. The spot, she describes, “stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain.” And so, “in the same way an unventilated tunnel slowly fills with mold, the pupillary blockage led to the growth of a cataract.”

Thus begins a remarkable exploration into sight and the perceptions of childhood. Nettel, a talented Mexican

culture May 10, 2015

The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell

Inez, the narrator of this New York-set novel about life following a plague, is off the grid and out of the loop. But her status in the world makes her remarkably perceptive. She speaks her own sort of melodic, repetitive, and grammatically odd language, which serves the purpose of drawing attention to her insights.

FOX News pundits yelling about grounding flights from Africa to stop Ebola from spreading to the United States would be in good company in Carola Dibbell’s gleaming and disaster-ridden debut novel. Set in New York City in the near future, The Only Ones calibrates a new normal based on surging of distrust. A pandemic has swept the globe, killing millions, and like aftershocks, pathogens continue to wreak havoc. Mothers hide their children in public toilets to avoid quarantines. People run not only from viruses but also from vaccination drives. A neighbor is someone who could report you for not

Jane Yong Kim