Book Reviews
Dubravka Ugresic’s “Karaoke Culture”
Part of the allure is for the amateur to wrest the microphone away from the stars and, for a moment, to take their place in the limelight.
Tomás Eloy Martínez’s “Purgatory”
On a certain level, "Purgatory" is a metaphorical ghost story—a meditation on loss, invisibility, and vanishing
Abdourahman Waberi’s “Passage of Tears”
On its most immediate level, "Passage of Tears" is coiled tight with the tensions of a thriller.
January 2012
The Ark
Crates of poultry are piling up in my yard, my attic’s an aviary, my cellar writhes with reptiles
Seizing Cervantes
The plan involved gradually rewriting "Don Quixote" over the years, so that no one would notice and collective memories would forget the details. Implausible?
The Eagle
You close your eyes so as not to see/ How the cadavers hang from a kapok tree.
Ketchup
I burned down the McDonald’s, for the sake of my life
God’s Obituary
Curiously, in recent years God became the most outspoken critic of his own work
To the Islands
Under her feet, the boat was shaking and creaking as bigger, stronger waves were beginning to hit it.
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