Doing our best since 2009
Translated by Marita Thomsen, On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen is a meditation on the many losses of age and how these losses are balanced—sometimes—by insight and wisdom. This slim novel, which got under my skin and into my dreams, is also the first book by a Faroese woman to appear in…
I discovered Berkeley Springs because I had it in my mind to visit some hot springs within a few hours drive of Washington, D.C.
Carolina Pihelgas’ The Cut Line is two things at once: a classic story about a bad breakup, and thoughtful geopolitical fable. Gorgeously translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, the novel follows Liine, a middle-aged woman who flees her life in the city of Tartu, in southern Estonia, in an attempt to escape an abusive…
As a lover of the retelling of history to promote the female gaze and/or reshape a less sexist heroine, and of travel writing in general, I picked up Chandra Grace Johner’s debut collection Naked in Turkey (AOS Publishing).
How We See the Gray, Rachel León’s debut novel, immerses the reader in the child welfare system. At one point, the team of social workers looks at mugshots online and plays a game to guess what each person did to end up in jail. The team genuinely cares about their work; they are just blowing…
Jon Hickey’s debut novel Big Chief (Simon & Schuster) tackles political corruption and family ruptures on the Passage Rouge reservation in the Northwoods of Wisconsin where Mack Beck, a reservation president who looks the part with “that long hair, that immovable mountain mass, the beadwork medallions and satin ribbon shirts” (15-16), but is only a…
Having neither a beginning nor an end, a perfect circle is continuous—a loop made of points equidistant from a fixed center. How fitting, then, that Claudia Petrucci’s The Perfect Circle, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, resists a singular beginning. Instead of starting from a single point in time, the novel cycles between…