The Art of Repetition: Kenzaburo Oe’s Death by Water

Oe again explores how fiction and truth mingle to create not just personal histories and relationships, but narratives of entire societies.

Boundaries of Choice: Tara Ison’s Ball

All paths lead to subjugation, to the forfeit of individual identity, to the death of the self.

Remembrance of a Splintered Past: Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover

Isabel Allende’s lyrical use of language, kept intact in Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson’s translation, alone makes this melancholy novel a treat to read.

Take It or Leave It: Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man from Another Place

Dennis Lim offers a wealth of poignant anecdotes that elaborate on David Lynch without attempting to reductively “explain” him as a human or a creative.

A Thrilling (Re)discovery: Jeannette Winterson’s The Gap of Time

That the novel feels as fresh as it does is partly due to the thrill of rediscovery.

Redeeming a House of Fire: Ashley Clark’s Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

After reading the book, the film remains a challenge: narratively, stylistically, temperamentally.

A Life of Allusions: Patti Smith’s M Train

Smith’s dreamlike tome feels like having unfettered access to the punk poet laureate’s innermost workings.

Of Light and Darkness: Brian R. Jacobson’s Studios Before the System

Brian R. Jacobson discusses architectural formations as inextricable from their industrial and artistic capabilities.

Language in Translation: Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth

Valeria Luiselli’s novel is a meditation on the arbitrary nature of language and the commodification of art.

Hopeless Possibility: Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus

It would be oblivious to deny that Watkins in part shares her visions of sweltering badlands with writers like Joan Didion or Denis Johnson.

Giving Shakespeare His Due: Brian Selznick’s The Marvels

It comes to life as a touching portrait of storytelling’s way of restoring (and creating) fully-fleshed family units.

A Beguiling Spinoff: David Mitchell’s Slade House

Each chapter is a testament to Mitchell’s ability to call forth an entire character’s life with an economy of language that’s beguiling.

A Dazzling Puzzle Box: Salman Rushie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Rushdie bellows A Thousand and One Nights’s narrative influence in a sprawling novel that’s an ode to storytelling.

Freeing the Body: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen

The tension in the novel comes from Eileen finding within her a certain strength she doesn’t want to lose, finding her voice and realizing that it’s worth being heard.

Review: Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Kleeman has an astute eye for pop culture, and her postmodern send-up of consumerism will remind readers of White Noise.

How Pain Shapes the Future: Gabriel Urza’s All That Followed

It may be centered around a dead man and the past, but at its heart it’s a book more concerned with the pain the living carry and the future it has shaped.

Interview: Larry Kramer Talks The American People, AIDS, Career, and More

At 80 years of age, the iconoclast evinces the same passion that has animated his provocative work up to this point.

Review: Adilifu Nama’s Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino

Review: Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel

This time, Anderson comes to play from the outset, with a sense of openness, and of shared intimacy with Seitz, that might be somewhat misleading, but is nevertheless revealing.

Review: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

The likelihood of finishing so quickly only enhances the resonance: The text itself becomes a moment that can pass.