Reviews

If the apple is that most iconic of American fruits, what is its counterpart among diasporic cultures from Asia? When I was growing up in Baguio City in the Philippines, one could buy tissue-wrapped “Red Delicious” apples and “Sunkist” oranges imported from the United States in the “PX” (post exchange) section of the market, but […]

Every piece included in Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, a new anthology edited by Anjanette Delgado, grapples with the concept of “uprootedness,” a term used by Reinaldo Arenas, an influential Cuban novelist and gay activist in the 1960s and ’70s, who eventually fled to Florida. In a 1983 interview with […]

God tastes like a walnut. Jesus tastes like fried chicken. Dolly Parton tastes like Sweet’N Low, and matricide—for any correlation or the lack thereof—tastes like peach cobbler. Monique Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2011), is a coming-of-age story that is more memory palace than an ethnography that seeks to portray itself as a […]

Like Yaa Gyasi’s previous novel, Homegoing (2016), and in the spirit of many other works by West African writers, her latest book, Transcendent Kingdom, straddles two worlds. This story about how a young woman resolves the tension between her African and American heritage uses a collage of memories set in Ghana and the United States […]

“I brought you a metaphor,” quips a character named “Fragile,” as she hands Death Stranding’s protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, a golden mask that resembles a human skull. Fragile is inheritor and chief executive of Fragile Express, a shipping company tasked with delivering supplies to human survivors of a cataclysmic event—the eponymous “Death Stranding”—that eradicated huge […]

Virga, a derivation of the Latin word for “branch,” is the name for rain that dries before it touches the ground, appearing as a mass of streaks diffusing underneath a dark cloud. Shin Yu Pai’s newest collection, Virga, is a poetic reenactment of this meteorological occurrence. While venerating her genealogy, Pai illustrates how rain, like […]

For English readers around the world, for the past decade, Yan Lianke’s novels have become integral texts that help the West reconcile China’s tumultuous past with its rise as one of the world’s modern superpowers. Lianke’s savage, fabulist satires of Chinese society span Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and more recently, the […]

The emergence of the term global poetics has had a belated beginning in the Anglophone world. Only recently have scholars, most of whom were trained at the University of Virginia, used this term to place poetry within a global frame. For much of the past two decades, debates surrounding what has been called “world literature” […]