Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction. Nothing Stays Put, by Willard Spiegelman (Knopf). America’s preëminent late-bloomer poet, Amy Clampitt, published her first book in 1983, when she was sixty-three. This lucid biography tracks her path to eventual fame. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Still Life with Bones, by Alexa Hagerty (Crown). In this meditative ethnography, a social anthropologist writes about conducting forensic work at mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina, and delicately explores the art, the science, and the sacredness of exhumation in the aftermath of genocide. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Stealing, by Margaret Verble (Mariner). Set in the nineteen-fifties, this finely etched novel centers on Kit, who spent her early childhood living by the Arkansas River with her white father and Cherokee mother. After her mother died, of tuberculosis, things went awry, and Kit, now eleven, offers a written account “of this whole awful mess,” which has led to her forced enrollment in a Christian boarding school. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Hit Parade of Tears, by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Helen O’Horan, and Daniel Joseph (Verso). An icon of Japanese counterculture in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Suzuki worked as an underground actor, posed for the erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and penned science-fiction stories, before killing herself at the age of thirty-six. This collection showcases her unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. |
No comments:
Post a Comment