RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...[a] crystalline memoir of illness and the hard knowledge that illness provides ... Boyer would refuse the heroism that description implies, as she refuses \'the angel of epiphany\' that readers want from \'the story of cancer.\' She’s right. We need writers of illness to challenge our fears and desires, what we want cancer’s excessive suffering and immoderate treatment to mean ... Boyer records how her illness exposes this world’s workings: its injustices, inequities, and profit motives. This process of exposure is radical and radicalizing ... Writing illness as Boyer does is a mercy: she invites us into this education in how everything breaks into nothing. The writer offers herself into this difficulty, and her readers receive what she’s learned of us.
Belle Boggs
MixedFull StopIn The Art of Waiting, the writer is struggling with infertility and visits her local zoo, where a gorilla is pregnant; she meditates on reproduction in human and nonhuman primate life, and on infertility as a state of 'waiting' ... This surprisingly unambitious approach to one of nonfiction’s richest traditions is where Boggs’s new book, a memoir that considers the larger subject of infertility, begins ...varied assumptions lack evidence and seem to contradict one another — but the essay hurries back to the writer’s own experience ... Too often Boggs avoids ideas that complicate the ideas she wants ...This book wants to offer empathy above judgment: to present a range of case studies and a difficult period in the writer’s life with a compassionate, even soothing reserve ...book’s language is often pamphlet-esque.
Eka Kurniawan, Trans. by Annie Tucker
RaveBookforumAmerican literature has been missing Kurniawan, without even being aware, until now, of our loss.
