Porochista Khakpour Sick: A Memoir New York. Harper Perennial. 2018. 272 pages. In her new memoir, author Porochista Khakpour delves into her own history of illness and addiction to craft a harrowing tale of sickness in all its forms and an unflinching look at health care in the United States. Although known in literary circles as a gifted and successful writer with a string of impressive accolades, Khakpour shows a very different side of her experiences . Rather than success, here we see the author defined by sickness as she grapples with mysterious symptoms that disrupt her life so fully that even moments that should be celebratory become riddled with anxiety and doctor visits. The list of afflictions is long and the list of answers to her numerous health concerns short; after years of insomnia, drug dependency, fainting, issues eating, neuropathy, and other physical and mental symptoms, she was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. It’s a diagnosis that itself carries significant stigma and unresolved issues; it is not widely understood or taken seriously in many medical circles, leaving Khakpour to justify her illness again and again with each hospitalization. But Lyme is one facet of this complex story of illness. Khakpour shines a light on the ways in which prolonged sickness tries and strains personal relationships that become all the more critical as illness stretches on for months and then years, and her long unresolved health concerns challenge simple narratives about the way we receive care. Her devotion to exploring her own history, sense of self, and the numerous facets of her illness makes this an at-times emotionally difficult book to read, which is in part why this memoir is so important. Rather than offering readers an uplifting story of overcoming illness, Khakpour’s story is an example of when things continue to go wrong and the way society responds when there are no easy answers. Bridey Heing Washington, DC Daisy Hildyard The Second Body London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2017. 128 pages. There is a long tradition of dualism in Western thought and culture. Many times philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have presented the world as split between realms we can touch and realms we must imagine. In The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard presents an updated dualism between the animal bodies in which we eat, breathe, and sleep and the virtual bodies of our global connections and environmental impacts. Juan Gabriel Vásquez The Shape of the Ruins Trans. Anne McLean MacLehose Press Translated from its original Spanish, this novel combines history, crime, and autofiction as the author meets an eccentric friend who drags him into the world of Colombian political conspiracies. Investigating the murders of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Rafael Uribe Uribe, he struggles to reconcile history, facts, stories, and hearsay. Ultimately, the thriller compels an examination of how a novel can be “the private history of nations.” Abdourahman A. Waberi Naming the Dawn Trans. Nancy Naomi Carlson Seagull Books Translated into English from French, French-Djiboutian novelist and poet Abdourahman A. Waberi’s collection contains a set of reflective, introspective poems. He highlights the spiritual and emotional aspects of the individual moment and the history and culture these moments create. The poetry is sparse but to a powerful effect. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 91 Hildyard’s focus is on her own personal understanding of her “second body.” She writes, “I need to find some places where real life and this global truth—the two bodies—come into one another,” and she is up front about her lack of advice for anyone else’s bodies. In this investigation , Hildyard interviews a number of people: butchers, wildlife investigators , geneticists, biologists. At one point she claims that “Since Darwin, we have known that species do not exist,” but of course that isn’t correct: evolution posits a common ancestor, not the absence of speciation . But The Second Body also questions whether individuals truly exist—can there really be a first body, since the animal body is always a symbiosis of many different organisms? (Recent research shows that our human cells are literally outnumbered by the nonhuman cells in our bodies.) For some of her sources, the eclipsing of the first body...