RaveWorld Literature TodayStepanova’s writing presents itself as more clearly of a learned or scholarly character: it engages explicitly with Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and other writers interested in photography and history ... when remembering memory, besides contemplating the lives of family members, Stepanova is also making an existentialist statement on the brink of an abyss wherein history disappears. Sebald is the closest comparison in this regard ... this great book is a highly urgent theological treatise on memory and saving.
Marilynne Robinson
RaveWorld Literature TodayIn a way similar to teaching, writing—fiction and poetry especially—is offered up, offered beyond the limit of any moral doctrine and any community, beyond any name. For this impossible, defenseless gesture of writers and teachers, Jack makes a lasting refuge.
Roberto Calasso, Trans. by Richard Dixon
PositiveWorld Literature TodayCalasso is an erudite of nineteenth-century proportions. His references are innumerable, and that is why, in selecting one as decisive, nothing is given away ... In The Unnamable Present, Calasso faces up to a world that has done away with his very element—the culture of analogy—as it has irrevocably committed to a digital, virtual reality. This book could very well record an analogist’s final guidance and implorations to that world.
Christian Wiman
RaveThe Millions\"He Held Radical Light displays the poetical prose familiar to readers of [Wiman\'s] My Bright Abyss: Every sentence is chiseled into stone, beautiful and lasting. Although Wiman can be casual in his formulations... his ear for the rhyme of a prose sentence, enhanced with great precision and sincerity, makes for a reading experience that is extremely rare ... In He Held Radical Light, Wiman sounds more at ease, surer of himself, as he is more generous to share his life with his readers.\
