About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Positive Booklist His undeniable gifts for creating sympathetic characters and telling involving stories still define a powerful if slowly diminishing zephyr of the zeitgeist.
Deborah Jackson Taffa
Rave Booklist The result of a lifetime, Taffa’s remarkable debut stands out from other contemporary memoirs and Native American literature.
Héctor Tobar
Rave Booklist Eye-opening ... Timely, intelligent, and generous, this is a must-read from Pulitzer Prize–winner Tobar.
Joshua Bennett
Positive Booklist Composed in dynamic, interlocking scenes, the story unfolds effortlessly despite the scholarly rigor and research evident in the writing ... Scans of original posters, programs, and photographs from these early days complement excerpts from the poems themselves, which pop and echo off the page.
Jac Jemc
Rave Booklist Immediately enthralling ... A lengthy book by most measures, Jemc’s propulsive pacing, evocative concision, and the episodic structure make for quick reading. But the rapturous recounting of these fated characters’ lives will buzz for some time in readers’ minds.
José Olivarez, trans. David Ruano
Rave Booklist Olivarez elevates small but notable moments through a sensitive, introspective speaker who must learn tough lessons on the streets of Calumet City ... But Olivarez also undercuts well-worn tropes of Mexican-American migration by offering glimmers of hope ... The book includes a Spanish translation and bilingual readers will enjoy flipping back and forth to see how the prism of each poem changes its hue in the light of another language.
José Olivarez, trans. David Ruano
Rave Poetry Foundation So many poems in Promises of Gold... play with entertaining contradictions as they explore desire and fulfillment in the speaker’s complicated relationships with countries and cultures, as well as with lovers, friends, and family ... By including a Spanish translation of the entire book, Promises of Gold charts another course, transporting language back across the border ... It’s a fascinating aspect of the collection.
Oscar Hokeah
Rave Booklist Hokeah peppers his quick, punchy prose with untranslated indigenous vocabulary, which invites readers into the storytelling and binds the chapters in a shared vernacular. The result is a profound reflection on the ways familial and cultural trauma can threaten every generation while those very connections can also promise salvation.
Erika L. Sánchez
Rave Booklist Refreshingly candid ... Sánchez spares no detail in relating her life experiences ... Sánchez uses amusing anecdotes to chronicle the chronic pain she endured ... An engrossing, accessible, heart-opening recollection of a fascinating life.
Ada Limón
Rave Booklist Sparkling ... The poet’s bright and clear-eyed lyrics extract the most profound tenderness from the simplest moments ... Limón measures time in evocative, unexpected ways ... An understated, powerful, unforgettable collection, and no doubt one of the best of this year.
Hernan Diaz
Rave Booklist For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz’s novel is compulsively readable, and despite taking place in the early 1900s, the plot reads like an indictment of the start of the twenty-first century with its obsession with obscure financial instruments and unhinged capital accumulation. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance.
Ocean Vuong
Rave Booklist ... quiet, astonishing lyrics. Vuong conjoins the figures of motherhood and time (the speaker’s mother works at a local clock factory, for example), while drawing from the deep wellspring of his Vietnamese heritage ... For all its evocative intensity, the book’s not without its humor, albeit often dark and pointed ... Even the most ostensibly simple moments prove mesmerizing in Vuong’s treatment.
Carl Phillips
Rave Booklist With an entirely new collection of poetry from Phillips bundled together with a selection of his multifarious work from across his 30-year career, this is a master class in his deceptively gentle voice and striking depictions of raw humanity ... Phillips nearly always cuts straight to the heart ... every selection provides a portal to this accomplished author’s work. An important milestone in the still flourishing career of a most brilliant poet.
Paul Tran
Rave Booklist ... stunning ... Formally inventive, Tran includes a series of persona poems written from the perspective of cadavers used in sixteenth-century anatomical studies, some whose skin was supposedly used to bind books ... A darkly intelligent and exquisite debut.
Tracy K. Smith
Rave Booklist This collection bundles several dozen poems from Smith’s outstanding oeuvre with 18 new poems collected under the header \'Riot,\' and bookended by two eponymous poems. The collected poems reflect the bright arc of Smith’s career ... The first of Smith’s stunning new poems concludes with scandalously perplexing stanzas cascading down the page ... Smith’s admirers will enjoy revisiting favorite poems and reading new works, while this volume will stand as a welcoming and dazzling introduction to Smith’s poetry for first-timers.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken
Positive Booklist This engaging, if protracted, novel follows a group of Norwegians whose narrative orbits mostly avoid one another, except in their mutual experience of this odd astronomical happening ... Astronomically prolific Knausgaard’s relentless attention to the minutiae of everyday life defines the prose, and readers will recognize the novel’s realist texture from the author’s autofictional magnum opus, My Struggle ... Readers hungry for more of this author’s immersive storytelling will burn through this tome, while those new to Knausgaard may find it a compelling point of entry to his other works.
Antonio Michael Downing
Positive Booklist Downing’s lush language and sensory details make the fascinating events of this memoir pop. An authentic, entertaining, and timely account of a creative immigrant’s experiences.
Pablo Neruda trans. by Hardie St. Martin and Adrian Nathan West
Rave Booklist The memoirs of Pablo Neruda (1904-73), the great Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, first translated into English in 1977, have been newly expanded here in subtle and significant ways with the addition of previously unpublished or incomplete manuscripts, explanatory editorial notes, and an instructive chronology ... This greatly improved edition will appeal to Neruda completists and aficionados, and it will serve as a fascinating entry point for anyone interested in a firsthand look at the raw material of this legendary poet’s life.
Kaveh Akbar
Rave Booklist This incandescent second collection of poetry from Akbar...illuminates questions of divinity and language in swift, surprising lyrics. An Iranian-born writer of unmatched imagery and searing critique, Akbar uses plainspoken language...and otherworldly imagining...to collide our world and the next ... his obvious skill and subtle flirtation with self-deprecation will surely endear readers to this volume’s exceptional speakers.
Donika Kelly
Rave Booklist ... devastating ... These walloping lyrics land like a punch to the gut, but just as powerful is what Kelly elides and omits. In several poems, unspeakable acts are redacted by dark bars or by brackets that hold blank space, resisting closure. A harrowing work of courageous lyricism.
Rivka Galchen
Rave Booklist Though the story unfolds in seventeenth-century Germany, Galchen gives Kath and the rest of her characters modern speech habits in a way that retains authenticity and makes for compulsively readable prose. Each short section expands the Reformation-era world of the novel, drawing readers into the small-town drama ... The highly satisfying result is part portrait of an eccentric woman, part social drama, and part nuanced recasting of historical misogynies.
Brenda Peynado
Rave The Boston Globe The majority traffic in science fiction, fantasy, fabulism, or the surreal, even as they retain an edge of cutting satire or searing insight ... For all their genre-bending brilliance, Peynado’s shape-shifting stories prove most striking when they deal in the uncanny, that gray zone between the recognizable and the repulsive ... produces a world that feels almost more real than our own, as if reality’s excesses have spilled over onto the page ... It’s this magic, the ability to lead her readers into worlds that are structured very much like our own, yet still deliver surprising punches, that sets Peynado’s debut apart. This is true of her use of speculative storytelling elements, as well as her incorporation of issues of ethnicity, class, and nationality. In every instance, it’s essential that her characters are Dominican or Mexican or white. The characters’ migratory decisions, and histories, and outcomes are crucial to the telling. The fantastic and the surreal are never incidental to the stories’ worlds; they always accentuate what’s already there. In this, Peynado’s harnessing of the diasporic imagination establishes her as a true magician of the marvelous real.
Divya Victor
Rave Booklist This intensely multitudinous collection reflects the poet’s heritage ... This is an incredibly well-crafted collection by a globally minded, locally rooted, exceedingly brilliant poet.
Alex Dimitrov
Positive Booklist Dimitrov writes poems shaped by a cosmopolitan air of hip self-awareness. His third collection delivers candid snapshots of life for a gay thirtysomething in his city ... In a series of celestial-themed poems, Dimitrov matches perfect metaphors with profound reflections.
Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer
Rave Booklist Bolaño’s brilliant oeuvre expands with another bright starburst, this one comprising three separate yet thematically connected novellas ... Like much of Bolaño’s more recent posthumous work, this title’s been assembled from a seemingly endless archive of handwritten notes and floppy disks. Even in unfinished works, Bolaño’s inimitable style and searing vision will appeal to fans and new readers alike.
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell
Rave Booklist Enriquez returns with another book of short stories, each one equally breathtaking, off-kilter, even deranged ... While Enriquez’s indelible images will sear themselves into readers’ memories, it’s her straightforward delivery and matter-of-fact tone that belie the wild, gasp-worthy action unfolding on the page. This makes for surprising, occasionally gut-wrenching reading.
Tommye Blount
Rave Booklist Blount’s lyrics seem to live outside space and time, blending references to history, art, and contemporary concerns into expanding galaxies on the page ... Blount is also an ekphrastic poet of the highest degree ... A captivating, unrelenting collection of poetry composed of sharp-edged truths and beautiful complexities.
Edited by Joy Harjo
Rave Booklist ... the most comprehensive and nuanced anthology of Native Nations poetry to date ... If there’s one poetry anthology that belongs on every bookshelf in this country called America, it’s this one.
Valzhyna Mort
Positive Booklist ... speakers occupy a unique space between nations and eras, each one subject to the interplay of grave recollection and creative vision ... Mort’s poems are ethereal and personal, poignant and political.
Juan Felipe Herrera
Positive Booklist One of Herrera’s great gifts is his ability to treat this continental divide simultaneously as a conceptual abstraction...while also humanizing its inhabitants ... Herrera also undertakes the difficult task of re-orienting his relationship to the increasingly unfamiliar place this country has become ... Herrera returns to his poetic roots for another captivating entry in his wide oeuvre.
N. Scott Momaday
Rave Booklist ... a profound reflection on humanity’s relationship with its terrestrial home, the planet Earth. In this \'spiritual autobiography,\' Momaday addresses his intimate, evolving relationship with the land in quick vignettes composed of disarmingly short paragraphs that depict moments big and small ... Momaday writes with a sense of responsibility and sincerity without being saccharine ... Even readers unfamiliar with Momaday will appreciate the timeliness of this important call to care and revel in its poetry, and longtime Momaday readers will especially enjoy references to the author’s early work, including The Way to Rainy Mountain (1976).
Vijay Seshadri
Positive Booklist ... small moments of intense personal intimacy ... Seshadri’s transitions from human interactions to the natural world feel seamless, so that a poem about a brown bear smacking a salmon from a stream can say as much about the human condition as it does about the apex predator. Other juxtapositions cause welcome disruptions ... More often than not, these stark contrasts read as a playful invitation to join Seshadri’s speakers on a strange and challenging journey.
Tom Bissell
Positive Booklist This buzzing collection brings together seven stories that showcase [Bissell\'s] gift for energetic storytelling, each tale imbued with humor and relevant cultural references ... Bissell’s affinity for fast pacing and quick wit will reward readers looking for an antidote to the doldrums of life under quarantine.
David James Poissant
Rave Booklist ... masterfully crafted ... Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, the novel’s brisk pace and perfectly executed moments make for a stunning, unforgettable story ... Poissant’s compassion for his characters generates empathy for even their most disastrous actions. A totally engrossing story of the long shadows cast by troubled relationships and the glimmer of hope that dawns after painful confrontation.
Andrés Neuman
Rave Booklist A talented travel writer, inventive storyteller, and acclaimed novelist, Neuman presents a realist novel told in an unconventional style which centers around one man’s life as refracted through the viewpoints of numerous women who knew him ... Speaking from different times in Watanabe’s life and four locales—France, New York, Argentina, and Spain—the women share their experiences, piecing together a multifaceted portrait of an enigmatic man ... Another fascinating work of fiction from a generously prolific author.
Laila Lalami
Rave Booklist ... [a] propulsive, fascinating, and infuriating account of citizenship in the U.S. ... an eye-opening, uncomfortable examination of the many ways U.S. citizens find themselves differentiated based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, and language ... Though certainly timely for the current political moment, Lalami historicizes these trends, which turn out to be as American as apple pie. Lalami treats this complex, incendiary topic with nuanced consideration and blistering insight.
Hannah Sullivan
Positive Booklist The influence of writers like T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden abounds in Sullivan’s long stanzas and page-width lyrics, which are littered with pitch perfect images...succinct turns of phrase...and exquisitely captured sentiments ... Sullivan elevates otherwise mundane daily interactions through artful specificity and repetition of sounds ... At times, playful and humorous...Sullivan skillfully shifts gears to poignant and profound ... Composed of three long poems, this volume presents an odd paradox: though intimidating in length, it leaves the reader wanting more. An antithesis to abbreviated Twitter poetry, Sullivan’s lyrics are nonetheless accessible and exceptionally rewarding.
Natalie Diaz
Rave Booklist Diaz follows her stellar debut...with another groundbreaking collection. Diaz’s electrifying poems buzz with erotic energy in lines that whisper privately to a lover...but also confront intensely complicated notions of attraction, often framed against this country’s ongoing imperialism ... An unparalleled lyric work, with one of the sexiest lines of poetry ever penned, \'in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake.\'
Stefano Bloch
Positive Booklist This autoethnography...takes readers for a tour of the 1990s graffiti scene in Los Angeles, sharing intensely personal memories of growing up destitute with a drug-addicted mother while also providing a wider analysis of the socioeconomic, legal, and spatial relationships at play ... Taking great pains to document and verify the veracity of his lived experience, Bloch blends resonant memoir, academic scholarship, and streetwise storytelling in a truly unique urban study.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Rave The Georgia Review Castillo exposes the border, amnesty, and legal status for the societal constructs they are—malleable, impermanent, and imprecise. At its heart, Castillo’s memoir seeks to reveal the secret handshake accepted by the state for passage, the only currency it understands: evidence of suffering ... Castillo makes painfully clear the indispensable arrangement many immigrants must submit to, in order to navigate the legal apparatus of the state ... Castillo composes sentences that might as well be poetry, locating heart-wrenching metaphors and arresting images ... These lyrical elements translate the frustrations and beauty of migratory life in the U.S. for audiences who may harbor serious misunderstandings about what it means to be undocumented ... While the majority of his memoir traces and retraces steps toward settlement, slowly approaching certainty and clarity, the last fifty pages of Castillo’s memoir rapidly accelerate, building momentum as an unforeseen sequence of events catapults the family into entirely unexpected directions. It’s a smart, propulsive turn at the end of a deeply meditative and prismatic memoir, one that launches the reader into a quickly compressing present, even as the unsettled legacy of the family looms heavy on the mind.
Lance Olsen
Positive Booklist ... daring ... Olsen employs a full suite of experimental techniques to tell the story, including newsreel headlines, screenplay excerpts, poetic verses, and ekphrastic reflections on unsettling scenes of bombed-out and abandoned buildings. But the real draw is Olsen’s supple, exacting prose, which captures the energy of cutting-edge art movements amid impending political uncertainty. There’s an eerie familiarity to the air of technological and social breakthroughs, with fallout or resolution just around the corner. Olsen manages the best of both worlds, a historical novel remarkable for its verisimilitude and a work of innovative fiction that never employs invention for its own sake.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Rave Booklist ...when an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry ... With the swagger of a boxer and the restraint of a scholar, Abdurraqib invokes pop culture and Black history with equal ease, alternating stream-of-consciousness prose poems with deeply introspective lamentations ... a fatal specter haunts the book, which is perhaps what gives every verse such urgency. Undoubtedly, this is the latest entry in what promises to be a long and fruitful career.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Positive Booklist Nye uses Janna’s voice to launch a journey to Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Dead Sea and also to Ireland, Guangzhou, and Arkansas. Wherever she lands, Nye has a gift for depicting the plight of oppressed peoples that yields lyrics that resonate universally and yet retain local flavor ... Nye doesn’t hesitate to engage politics directly, and there’s no question about her stance ... Incisive and unsparing, Nye’s caring poems will buzz in readers’ brains long after reading them.
Tommy Pico
Positive Booklist The fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy...is one freewheeling, semi-stream-of-consciousness poem that follows its predecessors in its book-length format, spanning a wide array of subjects, from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego to the Greek kósmos, with many stops along the way ... Pico’s lyrics may strike readers as unconventional in terms of the traditional Western canon, but they are forged in and speak urgently to a twenty-first-century audience. Another powerhouse collection from this incredibly prolific new voice in poetry.
Jake Skeets
Rave Booklist A winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Skeets’ darkly resonant debut book of poetry indulges readers in the dangerous eroticism experienced by its Dine speaker, for whom desire and violence intermingle at every turn ... Skeets’ scintillating collection joins the work of other excellent Native American writers, such as Dg Okpik, Natalie Diaz, and Sherwin Bitsui.
Rosalie Moffett
Positive Booklist Moffett weaves together ambitious lyrics and haunting imagery ... A beautifully constructed collection, with echoes of Carole Maso’s Ava (1993), and a bright promise for this poet’s future.
Aaron Smith
Positive Booklist Whereas Smith’s previous book of poetry dealt in nuance and innuendo, he shows a more easily humorous side to his writing here, while still addressing serious topics with breathtaking severity. Smith is at his funniest when name-dropping poets ... But Smith also tackles difficult subjects head-on ... Smith’s poetry proves endlessly provocative, often difficult, but never more of the same.
Jac Jemc
Rave Booklist Jemc returns with 20 electrifying short stories, some no longer than a few pages, but every one odd and memorable for wildly different reasons ... Jemc populates her stories with characters who may seem familiar, but whose actions often veer feverishly off-script ... A writer compared to Shirley Jackson and Henry James, Jemc continues to solidify her standing as a talented writer of the uncanny, the horrifying, and the hilarious.
Etgar Keret
Rave Booklist It’s difficult to characterize the work of a writer as prodigiously talented as Keret...for whom nothing seems off limits, from the nuances of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel to the late-night concerns of an ambitious goldfish. This smart, strange, completely enthralling collection includes nearly two dozen short stories that span a wide range of topics and tones, from the melancholic aftermath of a suicide jumper to the utterly surreal experience of a clone (or robot, maybe?) alone in a room. If there’s a through line, it’s narrators who get more than they bargained for ... While most of these stories debuted in magazines or on NPR, every one’s worth a revisit, while readers new to Keret will be dazzled.
Carmen Gimenéz Smith
Positive Booklist Few books of poetry are as acutely attuned to the present moment as the most recent title from the prolific Giménez Smith ... In deeply personal, unquestionably political verses, Giménez Smith proves to be a master of tight concision and unexpected turns of phrase, as when a speaker invokes epigenetics, inherited trauma, and ethnoracial legacies in America by confronting \'the battle older than me in my helix\' ... Bold and unapologetic, this collection is everything poetry needs to be in our age of hateful, anti-intellectual race-baiting: deeply thoughtful, urgently provocative, and endlessly imaginative.
Pablo Medina
Positive Booklist In this compulsively readable and darkly absurdist novel, Guggenheim fellow Medina is at his best.
Selva Almada
Positive Booklist Drawing language from each character’s worldview, and interspersing short sermons, Almada weaves together a quick and tightly told novel that includes smart glimpses into the past, which reveal odd parallels among the four and force each to question the roles of fate, providence, and agency in his or her life. This quick read capturing the soul of rural South America, a place of longstanding truths and pivotal conversions, is Almada’s debut novel and her first work to be translated into English. She’s been billed as a \'promising voice\' in Latin American literature, and this tale delivers readily on that promise.
Ariana Reines
Rave Booklist ...[a] tour de force ... Reines’ wildly rewarding poems are connected through clarity of voice, generous irreverence, and seemingly limitless purview ... Reines proves erudite in her selection of material, and readers may need to conduct quick research to decipher her subject matter ... It may prove impossible to completely characterize this powerhouse collection, which is part of its magic. Reines’ creation is to be paged through slowly, and revisited often, as it truly contains multitudes.
Stephanie Burt
Positive Booklist Burt offers a number of routes readers can take to derive satisfaction from poetry ... As the author of several collections of poetry and numerous works of literary criticism, Burt is well-suited to convince even the most skeptical readers that poems, indeed, should be read by everybody.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Rave Booklist With unabashed passion, the poet returns to subjects introduced in her first book, The Verging Cities (2015), further complicating binary notions of language, geography, and gender. In gleaming, evocative verse that combines Spanish and English, the poet interrogates her homelands ... A dazzling collection, it punches like spiked limonada.
Fernando A. Flores
Positive Booklist Stacked with other striking images and clever details, like the three canyon-sized concrete barriers that separate the U.S. from Mexico (and still fail to curb migration), this wildly imaginative, highly addicting, and ultimately endearing speculative first novel offers borderlands storytelling with an sf twist.
Mario Benedetti
Positive Booklist At times, Benedetti interjects his own experiences, blurring the line between memoir and epistolary fiction. Compared to Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, Benedetti deserves greater recognition stateside, and this will, one hopes, be the first of many of his titles to be translated into English.
Melissa Rivero
Positive Booklist ...[a] timely and beautifully rendered debut novel ... And Rivero succeeds in drawing to light the challenges many new immigrants face even from within their own scant support networks ... A complex and compelling portrait of Latin American immigrants and the experience of undocumented families.
Valeria Luiselli, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
Rave Booklist The story lines twist and shift, as they are delivered in flashbacks and fragments ... her fiction is shaped by sophisticated plotting, playful characterization, and mesmerizing momentum. Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño and André Gide, Luiselli navigates a dynamic, ghostly world between worlds, crisscrossing fact and fiction. Few books are as sure to baffle, surprise, and reward readers as the strange, shifty experiment that is Luiselli’s fiction debut.
Morgan Parker
Rave Booklist A profound meditation on the history and future of Black liberation ... A searing indictment, an irreverent lampoon, and a desperately urgent work of poetry, to be read alongside the work of Eve L. Ewing, Tiana Clark, and Nicole Sealey.
Ilya Kaminsky
Rave Booklist ... stunning ... portrays the persistent military occupation with disorienting and dreamlike lyrics ... at once intimate and sensual but also poignant and timely, with one speaker noting, \'I see the blue canary of my country / pick breadcrumbs from each citizen’s eyes.\'
Hala Alyan
Rave Booklist \"... Alyan packs this truly stellar collection of poetry with a preponderance of heavy topics ... If the collection wants for anything, it’s that each poem offers only a glimpse or a moment, whereas the subject matter could sustain several more pages of vicious, gripping verse. Luckily, readers can dive into the rest of Alyan’s burgeoning oeuvre...\
Valeria Luiselli
Rave Booklist A poignant portrait of current events. Intense and keenly timely, Luiselli’s latest work is perhaps her most politically relevant, and themes of translation and migration resonate, making it one of few novels that fully and powerfully convey the urgency of this unsettling situation.
Marwa Helal
Rave Booklist ...ambitious, groundbreaking ... Helal’s incisive lyrics cut to the core of persistent issues and explode boundaries between genres ... Footnotes and citations complicate the relationship between author, text, and audience, as the book defiantly refuses to categorize itself ... Helal has succeeded in generating poetry that is uniquely African, Arabic, and American. Highly recommended.
Stephen Drury Smith
Positive Booklist A lively, conversational transcription, one that faithfully recreates the energy in the room as Warren questions influential writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, yields to Martin Luther King Jr.’s loquacious speaking style, and prods Malcolm X on the role of Elijah Muhammad in shaping his views. Of additional interest will be the online audio archives of all the interviews, hosted by Vanderbilt University.
Roberto Bolano, Trans. by Natasha Wimmer
Mixed Booklist \"With a story line so thin it only narrowly constitutes a plot, Bolaño relies on the quirks and capers of his characters to propel the novel forward ... Less a finished product itself than a blueprint for Bolaño’s subsequent work, this title is recommended for devout fans of the author who can’t get enough of his expansive oeuvre.\
Javier Marias
Positive Booklist \"Internationally renowned for his dozens of novels and books of nonfiction, Marías has penned weekly newspaper columns in Spain for the past quarter century. This collection has been curated largely from pieces that had already been translated for publication in the U.S., and it includes just shy of 50 short entries, divided into 5 categories: autobiography, urban anatomies, literary matters, the cinema, and miscellaneous reflections ... In its attention to detail and sophisticated intelligence, this compendium resembles Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel without Seeing, and it may serve as a less politically charged and more progressively minded counterpart to Mario Vargas Llosa’s Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America​. \
José Olivarez
Rave Booklist ...a high-octane take on the rhythms and contradictions of life as a first-generation child of Mexican parents ... his poems occupy spaces of liminality between law and crime, English and Spanish, hard work and higher education ... A compelling work that embodies the immediacy of live performance, to be read alongside Chinaka Hodge’s Dated Emcees (2016) and the anthology The End of Chiraq (2018).
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
Positive Booklist Once again, he blends short meditations on everyday objects with extended diary entries ... Perhaps more so than in previous volumes, Knausgaard circles back to interrogate notions of consciousness and authenticity, continually debating the line between fiction and memoir, familiar terrain for anyone who’s been able to keep up with this prolific author’s impressive output. If not, readers should feel comfortable jumping into this cycle with any of the four books.
Ben Marcus
Rave Booklist Marcus...returns with another work of his unique and unnerving brand of fiction. Each story in this darkly prescient new collection immerses readers in distorted but startlingly recognizable realities ... Marcus is a master of injecting bleak apocalyptic premises with absurd humor and light moments ... Marcus instills his fiction with a deep sense of unease, one that is both strikingly strange yet uncomfortably familiar.
Ada Limón
Rave Booklist A master of examining themes from unexpected angles, Limón rotates her topics in kaleidoscopic turns ... Even in \'Bust,\' one of the book’s most complex and dynamic poems, Limón blends seemingly disparate images of women’s anatomy into a causal, almost nonchalant parlance that entices the reader into its realm ... Page after page, this proves to be a startling and tender, magnificent collection.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken
Rave Booklist \"Knausgaard’s penchant for turning autobiography into fiction becomes a dangerous ouroboros, as the novel devours his everyday life (which in turn provides fodder for this later text). But perhaps most notable about Book Six is a 400-page examination of Hitler, Nazism, and the nature of evil, which draws parallels between Mein Kampf and My Struggle: \'Not only were the words on its pages transformed into real life, but what happened there, in real life, stains each and every word.\' This uncomfortable comparison simultaneously explodes the purview of what fiction can do while zeroing in on the unique concerns of his narrator. Perhaps the most compelling of this epic’s installments, and an undeniably impressive literary accomplishment.\
Ed. by Heid E. Erdrich
Rave Booklist \"Indigenous storytelling and poetry have flourished for millennia in the Americas, yet few U.S. residents can name a single native poet. Editor Erdrich recenters this issue by narrowing the focus of this masterfully curated collection to \'Twenty-One Poets for the Twenty-First Century,\' as her generous, elucidating introduction explains ... Even the contributor bios take a different approach, forgoing long lists of achievements and awards; instead, each poet recounts his or her lineage, relationship to a native tongue (if any), writers they regard as mentors, and other native poets they recommend. In this way, Erdrich extends the scope of the collection. An immensely important anthology that belongs in every library.\
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Rave Booklist In vividly rendered prose, textured with generous Spanish, Contreras tells the story of an unlikely bond between two girls on the verge of womanhood ... Contreras’ deeply personal connection to the setting lends every scene a vital authenticity, and a seemingly unlimited reservoir of striking details brings the action to life, like the trumpets and accordions on Christmas Eve, or the messy Afro of Petrona’s suspicious new boyfriend. A riveting, powerful, and fascinating first novel.
Roque Larraquy, Trans. by Heather Cleary
Positive Booklist \"...a deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel ... The result is a profoundly strange, often-upsetting account of bodily exploitation in order to push the boundaries of art and science.\
Terrance Hayes
Rave Booklist \"Unsurprisingly, Hayes masters this classical form, taking creative liberties with meter and rhyme to deliver unsettling incantations; hostile confrontations; and occasional love letters ... With this incomparable collection, Hayes joins others in taking on the sonnet, including Natasha Trethewey and Laurie Ann Guerrero, reinvigorating its form and reimagining the possibilities of American literature.\
Jorge Barón Biza, Trans. by Camilo Ramirez
Rave Booklist Online \"Biza’s novel dives headfirst into the severely twisted familial dynamics that surround Mario, a deeply reflective, alcoholic narrator ... Based loosely on real-life horrors committed by his own criminally dysfunctional family, Biza spares no detail in depicting this violence, as Eligia’s flesh melts and disintegrates. This deeply personal tragedy anticipates the widespread, systematized violence of the Dirty War, during which right-wing death squads \'disappeared\' thousands of civilians and made such horrific crimes an everyday occurrence. A provocative, meticulous novel that’s both utterly repulsive and morbidly fascinating.\
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by by Ingvild Burkey
Positive Booklist This third installment in Knausgaard’s seasonal cycle departs from the encyclopedic style of its predecessors, Autumn (2017) and Winter (2018). Instead, Knausgaard opts for more straightforward narrative ... At times, Knausgaard slips into philosophizing on free will, the self, and the nature of personality, musings that acquire urgency when Knausgaard reveals why he’s written all this, telling his newborn daughter: \'I guess it was mostly for my sake that I did it, as a way of preparing myself.\'
Patrick Chamoiseau, Trans. by Linda Coverdale
Rave Booklist \"Passages rich with imagery and music, occasionally flecked with vivid creole vernacular, can be plucked from any paragraph on any page. One can’t help but wonder why it took so long for this treasure to be translated into English. But it is here now, and the world Chamoiseau creates through the eyes of this aging runaway reveals the enduring cruelty of bondage and the endless creativity of its survivors and their descendants.\
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
Positive Booklist \"Throughout the book, a seemingly limitless range of topics pop up, swirl about in Knausgaard’s characteristically precise cycle of thought, and subside into the background hum of this contemporary master’s autobiographical breviary ... Although this volume is boundless in scope and possessed of limitless intellectual energy, readers with a preference for conventional plot devices will perhaps better enjoy Knausgaard’s world-famous My Struggle.\
Daniel Alarcón
Positive Booklist \"Dynamic novelist and journalist Alarcón delivers a collection of loosely affiliated short stories, each buzzing and alive with recurrent figures and neighborhoods, like the young man who ventures into the city from his small provincial town, the mourning extended family that surfaces at a wake, and the busy denizens of sprawling urban slums introduced in the first story, \'The Thousands\' ... Alarcón’s gift for generating real, tangible characters propels readers through his recognizable yet half-real worlds.\
Elena Passarello
Rave Booklist ...[a] phenomenal collection of essays ... Passarello treats her subjects with dexterous care, weaving narratives together in a way that investigates, honors, and complicates her subjects ... assarello has created a consistently original, thoroughly researched, altogether fascinating compendium.