LOOKING AT WOMEN LOOKING AT WAR: A War and Justice Diary, by Victoria Amelina; translated by Daisy Gibbons and Uilleam Blacker Three years after Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war is still raging. Whether Ukraine will prevail remains, for the moment, unknowable. In the bracing introductory pages of her remarkable book, … Read more
DREAM STATE, by Eric Puchner Even if you live in Montana, the place is partly a dream — a fantasy shaped by our cultural imagination and the vestiges of frontier mythology. But our vision of its future, and that of the rest of America, is now filtered through the dystopian lens of climate fear and … Read more
THE ECHOES, by Evie Wyld Death and its ambassadors, ghosts, are perpetually in style. Lookit: Just yesterday, in fact, several people died. Already this year, two movies on the topic have premiered: a remastering of Michael Roemer’s brilliant 1976 cinéma vérité film “Dying,” and “Presence,” Steven Soderbergh’s paranormal thriller about a ghost haunting the new … Read more
THEORY & PRACTICE, by Michelle de Kretser In the 1980s, an intellectual revolution took hold on college campuses, spreading, this newspaper reported at the time, “like kudzu.” Under the deceptively unassuming shorthand of “theory,” a heady brew of philosophical schools and ideas — many of them imported from France — upended longstanding assumptions about language, … Read more
About 40 minutes into a recent performance of “The Years” in London, Stephanie Schwartz suddenly felt ill and had to put her head between her legs. Onstage at the Harold Pinter Theater, the actress Romola Garai was holding two knitting needles while portraying a young Frenchwoman trying to give herself an abortion. The scene was … Read more
SNOWY DAY AND OTHER STORIES, by Lee Chang-dong; translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Yoosup Chang In the first minutes of “Burning,” a 2018 movie by the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong, the voice of President Trump rings out from a TV newscast, setting the stage for the ensuing story of a young farmer’s son … Read more
JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney It is a truth universally acknowledged (at least in publishing) that books about books sell well, and, judging by their profusion, that includes those devoted to Jane Austen Inc. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf,” by Rebecca Romney, … Read more
NESTING, by Roisín O’Donnell “Nesting,” Roisín O’Donnell’s gripping debut novel, contains all the twists and turns of a classic thriller; but its heroine, Ciara, isn’t trying to solve a mystery or a murder — she’s a housewife struggling to cut ties with her abusive husband. Ryan is “the type of man who other women sneak … Read more
If the abuse crisis darkens much of this book, it is because the crisis has darkened the church, causing millions to leave. Disputes over homosexuality, priestly celibacy and birth control also appear so often that the reader might think that sex (the word or derivatives appear some 400 times in 514 pages of text) is … Read more
A few years ago, the translator Jeremy Tiang was browsing in a bookstore in Singapore when he came across an unusual book of stories. Written in Chinese under a pen name, the book, “Delicious Hunger,” drew on the author Hai Fan’s 13 years fighting in the jungles of Malaysia and southern Thailand as a guerrilla … Read more