RaveTime OutWatkins’s acute understanding of place puts her in the company of authors such as Richard Ford and Annie Proulx, writers for whom scenery is an indisputable force that provokes action. But above and beyond setting, Battleborn beautifully locates both the desperation of loneliness and the lengths people go to in order to relieve it.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Don Bartlett
RaveTime OutReading My Struggle is an immersive experience. With Knausgaard’s keen memory and robust imagination, scenes of quotidian activity become tableaux that illustrate the writer’s central conflict: making art versus fulfilling domestic duties ... His technique also achieves an aching intimacy, one that transcends the personal and makes Knausgaard’s pursuit of grand artistic ideals, his daily joys and misgivings, strangely familiar.
