Man V. Nature, by Diane Cook
by Avery DiUbaldo
Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature is a “masterful blend of surrealism, fabulist storytelling, and good-old-fashioned apocalyptic fiction.”
Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature is a “masterful blend of surrealism, fabulist storytelling, and good-old-fashioned apocalyptic fiction.”
Percy has turned himself into a cross-medium, cross-genre success whose unabashed embrace of work outside the narrow confines of literary fiction is opening up new opportunities and allowing him to have a hell of a good time.
In the introduction to their forthcoming translation of Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems, by Aleksandr Kushner, Carol Ueland and Robert Carnevale write that “translators simply have to admit that most of the music of most all lyric poetry, and most of its phenomenal presence, stay at home, in the native tongue. But ‘music of language’ is a metaphor.” Ian Singleton examines how this claim plays out in their translation of Kushner’s poetry.
“Annie Finch’s Spells, a sweeping new and selected book, pushes readers to consider and even embrace the tradition of women’s poetry. It is no conundrum for her.”
“No relationship is entirely transparent. More important, our understandings of relationships evolve and shift—knowledge dawns on us, bit by bit with new information, context, and different points of view. How two bodies interact in unseeable places and ways can tell an entire story, whether particular…or universal.”
“Every character in this book works,” writes Ellen Prentiss Campbell in her review of this new book. “Among the greatest pleasures of reading this novel is Freud’s detailed and well-integrated research into the truly labor-intensive life of a seaside village in 1914.”
“There’s no emotional implication for the writer or reader, but an opportunity to talk about horrors”: Jacob Paul and Hayden Carrón discuss Adolfo García Ortrega’s The Birthday Buyer in the context of the Spanish Holocaust novel.
“These are your people, like it or not, Kaufman tell us; you might as well love them anyway.”
J.A. Bernstein says of Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this might be the best novel to come out of the current carnage in Iraq.”
“West of Sunset is a welcome corrective for the Shakespeare-in-Love brand of writer idolatry, in which talent and will overcome all obstacles. Instead, this is the portrait of the artist as an old man, after the promise and the fame have been stripped away, and only the writing remains.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Anne Tyler’s newest novel: “Some fault her for sentiment or repetition, some find her characters too similarly marked by eccentricities of behavior and occupation. But others, like myself, believe authentic sentiment gets a bad rap, and recognize her people. Behind the public curtains, whose family, what profession, isn’t a little odd?”
“Accept the slightly soft focus and it becomes part of the charm of Gaynor’s particular book”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the pleasures of reading Hazel Gaynor’s historical novel A Memory of Violets.
