Fleeing Father
Fleeing Father is a bilingual novel, in English and German, by Romanian-born author Carmen-Francesca Banciu. Narrated by a Romanian girl who comes of age as her country marches toward revolution, this bildungsroman is the first in a trilogy newly translated from German into English by Elena Mancini and Catharine J. Nicely.
but the flames
Poetry is having a moment in the United States. Perhaps it is the collective search for meaning as we all experience these myriad crises together, but poetic expression feels more relevant now. After Amanda Gorman’s reading at the presidential inauguration, I received a flood of text messages and emails from people excited about the possibilities for American poetry in the twenty-first century. It could be that they are on to something.
Fires of Heaven
There is often an assumption that people of faith do not struggle with their beliefs, that they have wholeheartedly bought into an ideology to cast away their doubt and blindly assuage their pain. As someone who came upon my own spiritual beliefs rather late in life, I find the opposite to be true. I struggle far more as a believer than I did as an agnostic. In his latest book, Fires of Heaven, James B. Nicola investigates the myriad struggles of the religious life.
The Invention of Love
I’m thinking about death. I am thinking about love. I am thinking about death and love, intertwining. This is what happens to your brain when you read Sara Schaff’s newest book, The Invention of Love. Opposites attract and mix and slyly become one another in the perspective of the wry and self-effacing narrator of the title story.
Friday Night Knife & Gun Club: Episodes 1-5
For a while now I have held the position that for an American college (or better yet high school) student to graduate it should be required that they spend at least a few weeks abroad. Traveling away from one’s home country provides a priceless perspective on that country’s culture, economy, and politics. For instance, in my travels I learned that even though Hollywood is in the U.S. it is certainly debatable whether American movies are the best; that there are other countries in the world where it is simply more affordable for an average worker to live; and that in some cases our foreign policy has done real damage across the globe. American insularity is partly to blame for the myriad crises pushing our country to the tipping point. In her fiction series Friday Night Knife and Gun Club, Linda Collison chronicles these crises with a true love for pulp.
The Elsewhere
There are so many different kinds of poets in the world. This seems like a rather obvious statement, but it is also something we often forget. There are poets of different schools and sensibilities, of different educations and obsessions. A book of collected or selected poems can be a revealing omnibus, charting a poet’s path, perhaps from its earliest stages. Such a book can be quite gripping if it is curated well, following an artist through the myriad joys and struggles of their life while also reaching into the life of a reader in some way. The Elsewhere by Philip Brady is a career-spanning book of selected poems and essays written in a unique voice.
The Messerschmidt Poems
Over the years, a surplus of art historians, doctors, and psychologists, have scratched their heads over the interpretation of the Character Heads from the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783). They have suggested that the busts were the result of the artist’s alleged schizophrenia, or perhaps their creation was triggered by hallucinations. Some experts have even suggested physical ailments, such as Crohn’s Disease, may have contributed to the artist’s creativity. No one knows for sure.