Reviews

“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” […]

“Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent,” writes the Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova in In Memory of Memory, originally published in 2017 and presented by New Directions in a caring and delicate translation by the poet Sasha Dugdale. Survivors, all […]

How does one survive in the current climate, political and ecological? “Live in the world and hurt / the living lining, that’s how,” Catherine Wagner proposes in her recent book Of Course. Wagner stages interrogations of the self both playful and violent to reimagine nature writing and to inspire a sly revolution in the pastoral […]

When every screen in the world goes vvvzzztt and then blank, “What happens to people who live inside their phones?” Such is the question the world’s resident doyen of hysterical realism and American mythology, Don DeLillo, poses and answers in his most recent book, The Silence. Both brevity and absurdity provoke numerous reflexive questions when […]

“I came along a silk route,” Aditi Machado announces in the first line of the first poem in her new book, Emporium. The statement contains a careful imprecision: Machado substitutes the expected “road” for a near, but disorienting synonym, “route.” And the speaker is mobile, in motion; the poem refuses to situate itself in a […]

“Daddy, what’s Mississippi like?” In the prologue to his 2003 memoir Ever Is a Long Time, author W. Ralph Eubanks recounts this innocent, yet surprisingly complicated question posed to him by his young son one night during a bedtime conversation. The answer he gave told the story of a pastoral life, full of happy memories […]