Riverhead Books Research Articles

Samanta SchweblinMouthful of Birds

Rosella Postorino At the Wolf’s Table Trans. Leah Janeczko Flatiron Books Rosella Postorino’s novel, translated from the Italian and winner of the distinguished Premio Campiello prize, has become an international best-seller. At the Wolf’s Table is a gripping account of a young German girl during World War II begrudgingly chosen to help ensure Adolf Hitler’s survival. Postorino’s prose is honest and precise; breathing life into her characters, she takes readers back in time and down into some of the darkest depths in human history. Kiriti Sengupta Rituals Hawakal This smartly designed collection pairs Sengupta’s airy aphoristic poems with Partha Pratim Das’s blocky but stylish illustrations. Many of the poems in the collection have a kind of koanlike quality to them but draw deeply from Indian mythology and ritual, evoking spiritual atmospherics to foreground the mundanity of the everyday. Nota Bene Born into a middle-class family in 1905, he became an early leader of a liberal-progressive movement to free the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir of its monarchic repressions long before it was carved in half between India and Pakistan. The personal history of this seminal force for Kashmiri liberation is well documented elsewhere; this book contains a compendium of Abdullah’s letters, lectures, and press articles, which carefully document his laws-into-sausages struggle to achieve a free, independent Kashmir based on pluralism , a rejection of the religious split between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that ultimately truncated South Asia into endlessly combative , nationalistic, and regressive regimes. Often, Barack Obama being an example, a leader with progressive principles who works tirelessly to achieve compromises to improve conditions, while avoiding backlash wars, is destined to be reviled in doctrinaire quarters as a centrist, a neoliberal, or even a traitor to certain principles. Ideological purists will never fail to find some fault in those leaders tasked on the ground with making democracy work in a world where political divisiveness is as rampant as domestic conflict and divorce. Both in Khan’s insightful introduction and concluding remarks, and in Sheikh Abdullah’s own words, it is clear that he was determined never to sell out any constituents and always to keep their true—only apparently disparate —interests in tandem. Whereas we yet have no account of Obama’s struggles in steering a snaking course for America’s spaceship of state, reading this book and its compendium of Sheikh Abdullah’s resonant, unflagging, and articulate pursuit of Kashmiri welfare would perhaps enlighten those who delude themselves into thinking that achieving freedom and a vibrant democracy means hacking a straight line through the tangled jungle of competing interests and egos that is real politics. Abdullah struggled for real accord between all religious, ethnic, and political groups and was rewarded with long years in prison followed by roller-coaster years as Jammu and Kashmir’s prime minister and chief minister, and throughout his life he enjoyed the adulation of the ordinary people whose cause he adopted. Abdullah’s path thus provides a stellar analog to Nelson Mandela’s. Both negotiated without bitterness with those who had incarcerated them to further their just aspirations. Sheikh Abdullah never focused on enemies , but always on Kashmiri agency. This book is an intuitive primer in democracy for anyone who would take a practical, holistic view of the democratic enterprise. Jim Drummond Round Rock, Texas Samanta Schweblin Mouthful of Birds Trans. Megan McDowell. New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 240 pages. Following up on her 2014 novel Fever Dream (nominated for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize), Samanta Schweblin’s collection of short stories, Mouthful of Birds, takes readers on a road trip full of surprising and surreal pit stops, populated with characters that hover on the edge of familiarity. WORLDLIT.ORG 103 Books in Review The minimalistic and uncanny stories contain enough of everyday life—french fries, ailing parents, exact change—to make the incursions of strange figures like a merman , or a teenager who eats only live birds, seem acceptable, even plausible. Often compared to her compatriots Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, Schweblin does share their mastery of short fiction. Her eerie, not-quite-right settings, however, hearken...

Marlon JamesBlack Leopard, Red Wolf

characters who dreamed of migrating to the United States in some way, shape, or form. The Other Americans follows up on those dreams and gives nuance to previously articulated depictions of migration to America. Additionally, although the plotline of the text is fictitious, elements of Lalami’s nonfiction work (e.g., her New York Times essay “What Does It Take to ‘Assimilate’ in America?”) are readily discernible in the story arc she creates throughout the novel. Overall, The Other Americans is a thrill to read. It theorizes the “American Dream” by putting it into conversation with racial and socioeconomic categories. It questions the role of family loyalty. It introduces us to the struggles of Americans on the margins, and it wraps everything up neatly around the story’s pivotal moment: an accident that may or may not have been a crime. Lalami ’s finely tuned analysis of contemporary America is insightful and, at times, biting in its critique. Jocelyn Frelier Sam Houston State University Naomi Shihab Nye The Tiny Journalist Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2019. 128 pages. Whether a product of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or an ancient survival mechanism , it is exceedingly easy for us to cordon ourselves off from the suffering of others. Before reading The Tiny Journalist, I was thoroughly cordoned off from the IsraeliBooks in Review Marlon James Black Leopard, Red Wolf New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 640 pages. Fantasy, as we’re familiar with it in the global genre market, is a primarily Western -centric affair shaped by the writing of white men with many initials—J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. R. R. Martin— and circulated further through successful film and TV adaptations. (China, too, is a major player in fantasy, but its texts have had little influence outside the sinophone world.) Decades of arguments about what constitutes fantasy aside, there is no doubt that fantasy is a matter of great importance to world literature and culture and that fantasy from the postcolonial world has tended to be received in the literary market under the name “magical realism.” Jamaican writer Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is not magical realism. Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his historical novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (about Jamaica, reggae, and the geopolitics of crack in the 1970s–1990s), James has written a work of epic fantasy that draws on African stories and traditions, on the textual and material worlds of subSaharan Africa, and on a century of literary, generic, and popular-cultural influences to bring a bold, violent, and challenging world to life. Black Leopard, Red Wolf tells the sixhundred -plus-page story of Tracker and his search for a missing child with a company of adventurers (friendly and otherwise), including the werecat Leopard, the giant Sadogo, and the witch Sogolon. In response to James’s “experiment” slumming with epic fantasy, critics have repeatedly (and happily) cited similarities with Tolkien, Martin, and Robert E. Howard (creator of pulp fantasy hero Conan) and noted that James brings his literary flare for experimentation, poetic language, and the vulgar grittiness of reality to their fantasy worlds. They aren’t wrong, but the discourse is telling. James’s success setting the literary world abuzz about a fantasy novel, of all things, suggests what many have long known: in some ways, the old boundaries between genre and literature have become more fluid; in others, they have become more rigid. Repeated comparisons to Tolkien, Martin, and Howard betray a shallow understanding of contemporary fantasy and ignore the lengthy history of Afrofantasy that has run parallel to the now-popular Afrofuturism. What’s more, James’s novel fits best with the hope-effacing tone of grimdark, though even there it is somewhat out of place, proffering a sly, self-besmirching nihilism in place of grimdark’s typically bleak one. In this fantastic Africa, Tracker and Leopard at times seriously proclaim, and occasionally mock, their shared motto that MARLON JAMES 80 WLT SPRING 2019 Rae Armantrout Wobble Wesleyan University Press Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and California native Rae Armantrout’s provocative collection of poetry, Wobble, was a nominee for the 2018 National Book Awards and...

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú

Reviewed by: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú English Brooks Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018. 250 pp. Cloth, $26; ebook, $12.99. By now it's unlikely that WAL readers haven't already come across a copy or review of The Line Becomes a River, or of an interview with Francisco Cantú, the book's young author. Since its release the book—part memoir, part investigation—has been featured by NPR, Salon, The Guardian, The Economist, the New York Times, and dozens of other major newspapers and magazines across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Although Cantú has published previously in Ploughshares, Harper's, Guernica, Zócalo, and Orion, clearly his debut book is directed toward a wider general readership. While primarily a chronicle of and reflection on Cantú's three years working as a US Border Patrol officer on the Arizona–Sonora border, The Line Becomes a River weaves in additional autobiography, family and regional history, and other wide-ranging multidisciplinary research on the ways in which the US's increasingly hardening southern border cuts across and through the lives of individuals and families, communities and landscapes. Beginning with Cantú's academic training, the book proceeds to recount his work as a field agent, then as an analyst in a Tucson intel center, mining databases to study traffickers' "smuggling techniques and crossing patterns" (93), concluding with his return to civilian life. From the start Cantú asserts that his intention in signing on with the Border Patrol is to gain a more direct, firsthand understanding of the borderlands. Indeed, his move to embed occupationally is not unlike earlier writers such as Richard Henry Dana Jr. enlisting as a sailor to experience and better represent life and work at sea, or John Muir herding sheep in order to appreciate the Sierra more intimately, with the various messy and often serious contradictions and ambiguities that attend such approaches. But the book's central driving tension is broached early on and revisited throughout, primarily in conversations between Cantú and his mother, herself a retired national park ranger, worried about more than just her son's physical safety. Appealing to their common concerns, [End Page 511] he asks about her own decision to join the Parks Service, "because you felt you could understand yourself in wild places?" He continues, "I know there's something there I can't look away from. Maybe it's the desert, maybe it's the closeness of life and death, maybe it's the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I'll never understand it unless I'm close to it" (23). She responds unequivocally, reminding him that in joining a "paramilitary police force" he is "stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people" (24–25). Early on Cantú briefly historicizes the border's current militarization, drawing from nineteenth-century survey reports to illustrate how "the line" was first produced. Beginning with political calculations, paper treaties, and territory purchases, the border becomes a line surveyed across the surface of the land and along the course of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, where it "would again become fluid 'following the deepest channel' of the river" (42). He goes on to show how this reified boundary first took shape as seven stone monuments, then forty-seven (many of which were already being displaced or removed by the elements and local interests by the mid-1850s), and was eventually replaced by 215 iron obelisks, placed every two or three miles (49). Such passages, along with Cantú's own stories, demonstrate how arbitrary and untenable the project of maintaining and reinforcing such a boundary becomes, even from its inception. Beyond the narrative and the historical, Cantú's concerns here are also consciously representational. He frequently pauses his own account to consider how dominant narratives about the border have long tended toward fetishizing and commodifying violence (131–36), objectifying and dehumanizing migrants, and naturalizing their risks and their deaths (109–10, 187–88). Several episodes also depict some of the ways US border policy has effectively...

The Friend

PHOTO: XANDRO VANDEWALLE/UNSPLASH editor’s pick Sigrid Nunez The Friend Riverhead Books D o the books we need find us? A few months ago, I purchased a used copy of Sigrid Nunez’s seventh novel, The Friend. The inside jacket promised “a moving story of love, friendship , grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.” Having just lost our beloved dog, Wrigley, and deep in grief, I was both drawn to this dog-centric novel with its beautiful cover and a little afraid to read it. The premise appears straightforward : a woman who lives in a five-hundred-square-foot pet-unfriendly apartment has lost her friend and literary mentor, and now someone must take his dog. Naturally, the dog is a Great Dane; the woman, a self-described “cat person.” While this sounds like the perfect plot for the farce that will be next week’s sentimental television movie, the novel, fortunately, isn’t that at all. Instead, The Friend is the experience of dwelling in near solitude with the woman and the dog in their shared grief while the woman addresses her thoughts to her deceased friend. Because Nunez chose a narrator who is a writer and professor, those thoughts naturally intersect with teaching, writing as vocation, and literature as she’s working through her grief and considering the relationship between human and canine. For example, her thoughts in one place bring together Martin Amis, Edna O’Brien, Svetlana Alexievich, and Doris Lessing and, in another, move from Flannery O’Connor to Simone Weil and ask, “Who were these people?” Nunez’s intelligent narrator roams effortlessly and unpretentiously from Abraham Lincoln to Lady Gaga to an observation tying together Wittgenstein, Kafka, and George Bailey. Making excellent use of short sentences and short paragraphs throughout, the novel sometimes reads like journal entries—notes from a trip to a bookstore, a visit to the eye doctor, an academic joke that’s making the rounds. At other points, the narrative slows as we watch human and canine coming to understand one another (with a little help from Rilke and Knausgaard) in moments those who have thoughtfully lived with dogs understand but Nunez’s narrator eventually expresses so well by applying Rilke’s definition of love: “What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?” Though previously owned, the book was in perfect condition. Its prior reader, however, did leave one mark of having been there, a yellow sticky note at page 181: “I had absolutely no idea that the narrative was going to take this twist until I got here. It felt like a risk worth taking.” Apparently so. The Friend won the National Book Award for fiction last year. Michelle Johnson Managing & Culture Editor “I like to cross a debt off my list once I’ve settled it,” she said. Her drawing of the line across the paper lasted an eternity. “You mean the sweater?” I asked. She didn’t answer. She returned the notebook to her backpack and finally stood up. “It’s time for me to go home.” “Yes,” I replied absently. She paused for a moment at the door. “That young man was important to me.” No more would she call me “neighbor.” We’d returned to being strangers. We didn’t shake hands at the door; she didn’t even acknowledge me. While she was walking away, I saw—or it seemed to me I saw—that the young woman’s muddy boots had been replaced with gold sandals. At the very edge of the property, near the road, before she was lost to the landscape, her silhouette no longer had a backpack thrown over its shoulders. On an unfamiliar back hung a bow and arrow. I recalled the naked man’s body, his lips—gently parted. I wanted them to breathe in the air once more. I shivered , I’d like to say because of the cold. But my reality had completely changed. I could no longer lie so calmly. Translation from the Croatian By Jennifer Zoble WORLDLIT.ORG 47 ...

Review of: Kluger, J. (2011). The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Review of: Kluger, J. (2011). The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Review of: Kluger, J. (2011). The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Review of: Kluger, J. (2011). The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Review of: Kluger, J. (2012). The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Review of: Kluger, J. (2012). The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

Reviewed by: The Mothers by Brit Bennett Kalenda Eaton Brit Bennett, The Mothers. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016. 278 pp. Cloth, $26; paper, $16; e-book, $11.99; audio CD, $40. Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, is a compelling story that draws the reader into the world of a tight-knit community in coastal California. Like many examples of contemporary fiction involving youth, the narrative rests on intrigue, staccato dialogue, troubled characters (some more developed than others), toxic romantic relationships, and oblivious adults. On the surface, the novel is about Nadia Turner, a high school senior growing up in Oceanside. Nadia is smart, beautiful, determined, but emotionally troubled. Her mother, Elise, recently committed suicide for unknown reasons, and to numb the pain her father immerses himself in the church community. Nadia is left to pick up the pieces on her own and prepare to enter college in Michigan. During this time she clings to peers who give her much-needed romantic attention (Luke Sheppard) and friendship (Aubrey Evans). However, while sorting through the various parts of her life she makes a personal decision that affects everyone around her, long after she has departed for college. While the narrative focuses largely on Nadia Turner’s life, we learn from the book’s opening lines that this story is not only Nadia’s to tell. And this is where the author proves her brilliance. Bennett taps into the lives and experiences of a group normally overlooked in American fiction—the conservative, middle-class Black western community. Bennett depicts Oceanside as populated with diverse working-and middle-class families. Many have newly relocated to the area because of the nearby military base (Camp [End Page 139] Pendleton), and others, like the families central to the novel, have been residents for several decades, attracted to stability and social freedom. The networks in the community are connected through the church, which serves as a place of refuge and a meeting place for new residents. Bennett masterfully blends the messiness of older gossiping “church folk” with origin stories that hint at California’s promise as “paradise” for one and all. As in Walter Moseley’s southern California, Bennett’s adult African American characters all come from somewhere else. Bennett’s specific focus, however, on the millennial generation, who have “never lived outside California, never gone on exciting vacations, never left the country,” provides the reader with a different, contemporary perspective (70). Important to the novel is Bennett’s rejection of a stereotypical setting. Instead, The Mothers is as much about the banality of growing up in a California that is not San Francisco or Los Angeles as it is about characters’ choices. In The Mothers, women’s intimate decisions drive the novel’s action and conflict, partly because they contradict the community’s perceptions. For example, Elise is regarded as a doting wife and mother, while her daughter is a studious, obedient child. Aubrey is a naïve, God-fearing proselyte, and the church mothers she adores are aged, protective, and wise. But we learn all the women have secrets and wrestle with inner turmoil resulting in extreme choices, loss, and regret. As the novel progresses, other characters begin to reveal hidden pasts that also belie popular opinion. The Mothers maintains a healthy dose of suspense due to several twists, while the initial introduction of ancillary characters proves important at later points in the novel. Bennett is impressive in her ability to hook readers with tidbits of information that require us to turn the page. Although much is revealed fairly early in the novel, Bennett makes us want to know what happens after. As a storyteller, Bennett’s literary influences are clear. She uses the “we” collective narrator, a nod to luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison, and certain phrasing is reminiscent of the sensory descriptors present in folk speech (e.g., “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them” [2]). But again, [End Page 140] Bennett does not rely solely on dated approaches to writing fiction. The Mothers always feels very current and relevant—because it is. Bennett also rejects the urge to provide an unnatural conclusion. No...

Exit West. Fiction. By MohsinHamid. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017. Pp. 231. $26.00.

Exit West. Fiction. By MohsinHamid. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017. Pp. 231. $26.00.

Inevitable or improbable? Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution Jonathan B. Losos Riverhead Books, 2017. 384 pp.

A biologist sheds light on the evolutionary likelihood of human existence

The Narcissist Next Door. Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed – in Your World By Jeffrey Kluger Riverhead Books, 2015, $16.00, pb, 288 pp. ISBN: 9781594633911

The Narcissist Next Door. Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed – in Your World By Jeffrey Kluger Riverhead Books, 2015, $16.00, pb, 288 pp. ISBN: 9781594633911 - Volume 41 Issue 2

What to Read Now: Selected Works from the African Diaspora

6 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017 This is not the Africa you knew. These books, some rooted in Africa but mostly embedded in multiple lands, explore issues of race, equality, immigration, cultural shifts, and more. At their core, they capture the intimate portraits of family sagas, they lurk between this culture, that culture, this language, that language. They are filled with wisdom, knowledge, tenderness, wars, pain, perseverance and envelop us in a way we cannot expect, thus changing completely the way we experience a new resurgence of African literature. Yaa Gyasi Homegoing Knopf Set in Ghana and the US, this ambitious novel accomplishes what most African novels don’t: it reconciles the African with the African American, intricately weaving our histories in ways we cannot imagine. Gyasi’s characters are fierce, strong, proud, ruthless, mournful; in other words, human. We sympathize with this kind of new and raw vulnerability because we recognize it in ourselves. Following the lives of generations from two sisters (one in Africa, one in the US), Gyasi explores the complexities of slavery and race relations in America while pondering small, intimate moments. Homegoing is a masterpiece. New-Generation African Poets (Nne) African Poetry Book Fund Ed. Chris Abani & Kwame Dawes Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, the yearly poetry chapbook set is a delightful combination of emerging African poets. This year’s collection is no less ambitious in its scope: Nne introduces poets of a singular talent, exploring themes of belonging, questioning lands and seas that offer them refuge and refuse them at the same time. Giving voice to new poets is a particularly necessary task, and the African Poetry Book Fund continues to do so every year (see Matthew Shenoda’s essay on page 40). Helen Oyeyemi What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Riverhead Books If you’ve read Helen Oyeyemi’s work, you know how skillful she is with her characters . This short-story collection reaffirms Oyeyemi’s exceptional talent, as characters move seamlessly from page to page, engulfed in their own private lives. Oyeyemi is not a writer in the traditional sense; her characters do not undergo a transformation and overcome a set of challenges; instead, they are more complex in their nature, more eccentric in their needs. As readers, we experience them through her expert prose, and we are left always wanting more. Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet and visual artist who grew up in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, and in 2016 her full-length collection, Fuchsia, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Notebook what to read now Selected Works from the African Diaspora by Mahtem Shiferraw ...

Como los pájaros aman el aire

The diversity of the stories’ socioeconomic settings reflects the city’s, and the interactions between Dhaka residents from differing social classes make for particularly entertaining stories. This is on display in Shaheen Akhtar’s “Home,” translated by Arifa Ghani Rahman, in which protagonist Bindubula is beckoned by demanding wealthy clients to provide her services as a traditional masseuse. She traverses Dhaka by three-wheeled van and rickshaw, rubbing mashed lentils and other traditional beauty cocktails into backs and necks to make a meager living. The story ends with a revelation steeped in twentieth-century Bangladeshi history, which permeates many of the ten stories in the book. Wasi Ahmed’s “The Widening Gyre,” translated by Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman, depicts the city’s politically charged atmosphere, as three men march through the streets with a banner held high and very little fanfare, demanding justice for a murdered friend. With little popular support, their planned rally ends poorly, to say the least. Many of The Book of Dhaka’s stories contain references to traditional Bangladeshi customs, from the food described in several stories to the songs excerpted in Bipradash Barua’s “The Princess and the Father,” translated by poet Mohammad Shafiqul Islam. Rather than attempt to translate the untranslatable , the editors chose to present endnotes after each story, which offer both cultural and historical explanations when needed. The quality of the translations and their editing is a testament to the quality of output from the workshops held at the Dhaka Translation Center, which noted Bangladeshi poet Kaiser Haq describes in the foreword: these stories are as alive as the city they celebrate and describe. The Book of Dhaka is an exciting omen for the future of Bangla-language literature translated into English. David Shook Los Angeles, California Claire-Louise Bennett. Pond. New York. Riverhead Books. 2016. 195 pages. Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, Pond, follows an unnamed young woman who takes up residence in a village on Ireland’s west coast. Initially relishing the anonymity, the protagonist befriends her landlady and takes on lovers, yet her experiences with a lush backyard garden and her own imagination offer her much more satisfaction than most human interaction. A beauty of Pond is that it resists definition , reading as a novel, a novel-in-stories, or a story collection, and therein also lies some of its power and a key theme of the novel: the need to welcome experience on its own terms, without the constraints of human language. In “The Big Day,” the protagonist is bothered by a sign her landlady has staked next to the garden pond: “I wouldn’t put a sign next to a pond saying Pond.” Later, in preparation for a celebration , her landlady rents a portable toilet for the property with “a sign stuck upon it saying Toilet.” This humorous turn leads the protagonist to conclude that her first language is not English at all but one “simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” One of Bennett’s many gifts as a writer lies in highlighting the totemic power of everyday things. The main character finds joy in the science of properly placing fruit in bowls on her windowsill. Ink pens have a hierarchy and are used for different moods and occasions. Bennett’s prose is always lyrical, precise, and observant, reviving the world as readers might know it. In one particularly moving section, “Control Knobs,” the protagonist frets that only one control knob remains for her kitchen cooker, which she transfers from one prong to another after the two others deteriorate and split, rendering them useless. In the pages that follow, her unsuccessful search for replacements becomes a resonant meditation on time passing and mortality. In the end, Pond is a luminous book that illuminates the rich interior life of its central character completely. Patient readers will be well rewarded. Michael Hyde Fashion Institute of Technology Martín Casariego. Como los pájaros aman el aire. Madrid. Siruela. 2016. 182 pages. Rosa Montero says in La loca de la casa that novelists can be classified into two types: the hedgehogs (erizos), the ones who always come back almost compulsively to the same subjects, and the foxes who...

What to Read Now: Selected Works from the African Diaspora

6 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017 This is not the Africa you knew. These books, some rooted in Africa but mostly embedded in multiple lands, explore issues of race, equality, immigration, cultural shifts, and more. At their core, they capture the intimate portraits of family sagas, they lurk between this culture, that culture, this language, that language. They are filled with wisdom, knowledge, tenderness, wars, pain, perseverance and envelop us in a way we cannot expect, thus changing completely the way we experience a new resurgence of African literature. Yaa Gyasi Homegoing Knopf Set in Ghana and the US, this ambitious novel accomplishes what most African novels don’t: it reconciles the African with the African American, intricately weaving our histories in ways we cannot imagine. Gyasi’s characters are fierce, strong, proud, ruthless, mournful; in other words, human. We sympathize with this kind of new and raw vulnerability because we recognize it in ourselves. Following the lives of generations from two sisters (one in Africa, one in the US), Gyasi explores the complexities of slavery and race relations in America while pondering small, intimate moments. Homegoing is a masterpiece. New-Generation African Poets (Nne) African Poetry Book Fund Ed. Chris Abani & Kwame Dawes Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, the yearly poetry chapbook set is a delightful combination of emerging African poets. This year’s collection is no less ambitious in its scope: Nne introduces poets of a singular talent, exploring themes of belonging, questioning lands and seas that offer them refuge and refuse them at the same time. Giving voice to new poets is a particularly necessary task, and the African Poetry Book Fund continues to do so every year (see Matthew Shenoda’s essay on page 40). Helen Oyeyemi What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Riverhead Books If you’ve read Helen Oyeyemi’s work, you know how skillful she is with her characters . This short-story collection reaffirms Oyeyemi’s exceptional talent, as characters move seamlessly from page to page, engulfed in their own private lives. Oyeyemi is not a writer in the traditional sense; her characters do not undergo a transformation and overcome a set of challenges; instead, they are more complex in their nature, more eccentric in their needs. As readers, we experience them through her expert prose, and we are left always wanting more. Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet and visual artist who grew up in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, and in 2016 her full-length collection, Fuchsia, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Notebook what to read now Selected Works from the African Diaspora by Mahtem Shiferraw ...

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey (review)

Reviewed by: The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey Ahneka Valdois, Ph.D. Kevin Carey. The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015. 288 pp. Hardcover: $18.98. ISBN-10: 1594632057. As many pundits have pointed out, higher education is reaching a crisis. This crisis can most clearly be seen in terms of costs, with federal support being cut and student debt surpassing the national debt, but it also strikes at the identity and purpose of higher education. In his book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Kevin Carey presents a provocative vision of a dramatic shift in the future of higher education, based on its history and the development patterns of technology in contemporary society. Carey, director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, focuses primarily on the role that technology will have in bringing the conventional “hybrid” universities of the United States to their knees. He argues that, whether educators want it to or not, the hybrid college that is the backbone of higher education today will soon be compelled to make way for a technological revolution that will make high quality, affordable education available to students everywhere. Carey structures his argument around his experience taking a free, online course offered by MIT through the online program EdX. Carey chose to take “The Secrets of Life,” an online adaption of an introductory biology course taught by Eric Lander, focused on his work in genetics. Carey juxtaposes this experience against the current situation in higher education: massive debt and questionable outcomes. Then, using this experience as a jumping-off point, Carey explores the history of higher education, starting with the first college to be established in Bologna, traveling through Paris to Cambridge and Oxford, and finally arriving at Harvard. The author then describes three purposes for higher education that developed in America: the need to train skilled labor, the need to promote research, and the need to instill a liberal arts education in young adults. According to Carey, around the time of the Civil War a compromise between these three goals was achieved by Harvard’s president William Elliot. Elliot proposed that universities should be a place where students are allowed to chart their own course toward a profession through a multitude of electives offered by faculty who primarily focus on research. Carey labeled this type of college a “hybrid” college and used that term to typify the bulk of the higher education institutions in the United States today. This three-fold purpose, according to Carey, contradicts itself and leads to the problems that higher education now faces. Soon after Elliot proposed his model, most higher education institutes followed Harvard’s example. Carey notes that although the Ph.D. became the standard qualification for faculty after Elliot set his policy in place, few Ph.D. candidates are trained or prepared to teach, and, consequently, undergraduates are often neglected in the pursuit of various research interests. Carey makes the argument that at hybrid colleges, faculty have not been held to any special standard in regard to the quality of their teaching but have been left for the most part to pursue their own interests. Carey observes that today a university is not known or lauded for its quality of undergraduate instruction but rather for its reputation and prestige, [End Page 299] with the Ivy Leagues being the gold standard. As a result, administrators in universities and colleges across the United States try their best to make their institutions resemble Harvard and Yale. They build grand buildings and quads and establish the earliest founding dates that they can document for their institution. They offer their students luxurious amenities, all in hopes of attracting greater numbers of highly qualified applicants. Carey notes that Harvard has no difficulty making these amenities accessible to its lower-income students because of its large endowment. Not having the large endowment of Harvard, other institutions must continually make the higher education experience more expensive for students. Contemporary students and their parents, also pursuing the Ivy...

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Carey, K. New York, Riverhead Books, 2015

In The End of College, Carey (2015) presents the notion that new modes and cultures of learning couched in social justice will allow many people to, for the first time in their lives, attain higher learning. The author’s insights are informed by over twenty-five years of artificial intelligence data. In what Carey refers to as the ‘university of everywhere’, the future of higher education will be unbridled from formal degree programs. Hints of what the edX movement at Harvard and MIT are doing to revolutionize higher education include public portfolios that present an individual’s learning credentials in the new higher education economy. A professor of Education at John’s Hopkins University, Carey has served as an education policy analyst at both the state and federal levels. Carey’s views on the future of higher education will engage the LIS educator in thought about the future, if not ignite the impetus of radical change.

The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song by Ben Yagoda (review)

AMERICAN AND POPULAR MUSIC The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the American Song. By Ben Yagoda. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015. [310 p. ISBN 9781594488498. $27.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.It's not uncommon to hear statements to the effect that the American constitutes towering achievement in the history of this country, equal or greater than any of our other cultural or artistic endeavors, observes Ben Yagoda in the opening of The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the American Song (p. 10). Acknowledging that others have already made the arguments for this supposition, Yagoda lays out different goal with his latest book: to explain how the second quarter of the twentieth century produced an unusual wealth of popular music, commonly known as standards or the American Songbook. He looks at the factors that led to its emergence, decline, and ultimate resurrection. Although he has particular focus on the songwriters, he also examines the business, cultural, and technological aspects that affect this body of work and its reception. He carves out well-rounded understanding of the topic.Yagoda is careful to define his terms. He gives numerous examples of how the phrase Great American Songbook has been used by others, starting with Carmen McRae's 1972 album title (p. 2). He identifies the most prominent and the lesserknown songwriters, both composers and lyricists, remarking that many of the first wave were born within seventeen-year span and were typically middle-class Jewish New Yorkers, and a striking number attended Columbia University (p. 14). He addresses the geographic sources of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood both literally and metaphorically, and he describes their milieu in great detail.The narrative starts in 1885 when music publishing became profitable industry. As middle-class families gathered in the parlor, the simplicity of the songs of that era was marketing virtue, the repertoire accessible to the amateur pianist, the lyrics easy to memorize. Sheet music sales reached their peak at more than two billion copies in 1917; the biggest titles commonly sold five million copies. Yagoda names the entrepreneurs who entered the field at the turn of the century, who frequently had experience in sales rather than music and who were drawn by the low barriers to entry. The new job title of song plugger sprang from the publishers' marketing methods, and hack writers latched onto lyrical trends.The move to recordings by professional musicians and to radio airplay enabled shift to music with more musical and lyrical sophistication, and friendly rivalry among the coterie of composers and lyricists pushed them towards greater artistic achievement. Publisher Max Dreyfus of T. B. Harms was benefactor to up-andcoming songwriters, granting early opportunities to those who would become the biggest names. Changes in copyright laws made songwriting viable career for the most talented, and soon Broadway and Hollywood competed with Tin Pan Alley for the best work and workers. With the sister strains of jazz, sweet and hot, bands became the country's principal popular music delivery system, propelling music sales for jukeboxes and individuals (p. 69). Radio broadcasts broadened the bands' exposure. The big bands interpreted the works of songwriters or played them straight. Duke Ellington as composer and bandleader added to the repertoire.Economics eventually favored vocalists over bands-Frank Sinatra being the prime beneficiary. But changing tastes also played role in the bands' decline. The national mood was sentimental and somber during World War II. At the same time, movie tastes changed, with studios cutting back on musicals that had been springboard for new popular tunes. On Broadway, new breed of musicals featured more developed plots and characters, resulting in songs that were specific to their stage situations and that had little relevance outside the shows. …

Book Review The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Carey, K. New York, Riverhead Books, 2015

In The End of College, Carey (2015) presents the notion that new modes and cultures of learning couched in social justice will allow many people to, for the first time in their lives, attain higher learning. The author's insights are informed by over twenty-five years of artificial intelligence data. In what Carey refers to as the 'university of everywhere', the future of higher education will be unbridled from formal degree programs. Hints of what the edX movement at Harvard and MIT are doing to revolutionize higher education include public portfolios that present an individual's learning credentials in the new higher education economy. A professor of Education at John's Hopkins University, Carey has served as an education policy analyst at both the state and federal levels. Carey's views on the future of higher education will engage the LIS educator in thought about the future, if not ignite the impetus of radical change.Keywords: Higher Education, Social Justice, MOOCS, LIS education, Online learningThe End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Carey, K. New York, Riverhead Books, 2015, 269 pages, Nook book $14.99, ISBN 978-101-63459-2.IntroductionIn The End of College, Carey offers readers an engaging account of a proposed paradigm-shift in higher education. To set the stage for his thesis, he provides a brief history of the beginnings of higher education in Europe, and the subsequent establishment of the American university. The author then quickly enters into what we understand about higher education as it has been for the past half century. Carey chronicles what has evolved in the application of artificial intelligence to learning that unwittingly sets the stage for a new type of university; the university of everywhere. The content presents as if it were a biography of higher education woven with predictive views of the future informed by current trends in online education. Written in a style as equally provocative to higher education consumers as it is to higher education professionals, Carey voices what many may fear; driving change fueled by disruptive technologies. Those technologies are the toys and tools engaged by today's youth who are the post-secondary students of the near future.Library and information science (LIS) scholars and educators, although not the first to offer courses online, were among the first in their respective institutions to offer graduate degree programs entirely online (Haigh, 2007). These pioneering actions offered new economic models to institutions of higher education impacted by the decline in the economy in the late twentieth century (Bush & Hunt, 2011; The Economist, 2012). Since then, only an elite few LIS scholars have delved into the world of Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCS) (Stephens & Jones, 2014). Meanwhile, the discipline has been caught up in an identity revolution, better known as the iSchool movement, battling for modernization (Bonnici et al., 2009). Typical of revolutions, entrenched library advocates have planted their heels pushing possible bifurcation of the profession. Meanwhile, the threat imposed by further economic pressures, declining enrollments, and new skills and knowledge have demanded our attention, perhaps stalling our interests in the future of higher education on a long-term scale. Carey's book, The End of College, will reintroduce, if not reinforce the importance of the mode and mechanism for educating the next generation of library and information professionals.As the son of two academics, one a Ph.D. computer scientist at a large public university, and the other holding a doctorate in education, Carey was immersed in traditional academic life throughout his formal years of learning. With an undergraduate degree in political science and a master's degree in public administration, Carey has become one of the most renowned higher education experts in the country (Blue Engine, 2015). …

City of Clowns

After all, the corpses, the man bound to the pole, no longer can. Alison Mandaville California State University, Fresno Daniel Alarcón. City of Clowns. Illus. Sheila Alvarado. New York. Riverhead Books. 2015. 138 pages. Spotlighted already in 2010 as one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” Peru-born and Alabama-raised Daniel Alarcón pounds out fiction with the laser-like acuity of an investigative journalist and with an eye and ear for capturing the kinesis of consciousness of all walks of life in the Latin Americas. We get this and more with the publication of his short story “City of Clowns” as a graphic novel. (The story first appeared in the New Yorker in 2003 and later appeared in his collection War By Candelight in 2005.) Alarcón’s subtle yet penetrating prose coupled with the exquisite artistic talent of Peruvian Sheila Alvarado immerse us in the dangerous deep end of a contemporary Lima, Peru, laden with economic and political misery. As is characteristic of Alarcón’s southof -the-border set fiction, he, along with Alvarado’s black-and-white renderings, firmly plants us in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of an ordinary protagonist, Oscar “Chico” Uribe. His father, Don Hugo, is a handyman—and womanizer: Lima was “the place where he could become the person he’d always imagined himself to be. . . . To drink and smoke, to fight, fuck, and steal.” His mother’s nostalgia for a life lived in the countryside and nonstop work as a maid to los ricos blind her to the father’s ways. As the story unfolds, we learn that it’s not so much superheroic accomplishments that Alarcón and Alvarado are interested in conveying but rather Chico’s constant struggle to not slip into his father’s ways as thief and womanizer; in a remarkable turn of events, one of the mother’s rich clients, the Azcárte family, offers Chico a scholarship that opens doors for him to earn a living with his brain and words as a journalist. But this is not what interests Alvarado and Alarcón. Rather, the visual and verbal narrative combine to show his slide into patterns of behavior he so abhors in his father. Indeed, even though he earns a good living as a journalist, he teams up with a band of marauding clowns to plunder purses and wallets of workers riding city buses. As a clown, Chico enjoys his anonymity—as one of the “ghosts in the multitude.” He quickly finds solace among those who seek out dangerous thrills. Alvarado’s detailed illustrations intensify Chico’s rapid swirl toward the vortex of the inevitable: the repetition of his largely absent and now-deceased father’s rapscallion ways. Her fine art, detailed black-andwhite visuals, move us seamlessly between Chico’s experiences in the present and past. The fluid artistic layout (as opposed to a rigid comic-book panel grid) beautifully allows for an ebb-and-flow narrative movement that slows, pauses, and speeds our experience of Chico in a bustling Lima. Her precise use of light, dark, and shadows makes the representation of the city of Lima so strong that the megalopolis itself becomes a kind of monstrous character. The art illuminates the text, creating an artprose chiasmatic interchange that ultimately conveys Chico’s deep loneliness, within a space filled to the brim with life that teeters at the edge of a precipice threatening a vertiginous drop into nothingness. Frederick Aldama Ohio State University Antonio Altarriba. The Art of Flying. Illus. Kim. Trans. Adrian West. London. Jonathan Cape. 2015. 207 pages. Antonio Altarriba’s The Art of Flying splays open the Spanish civil war, and subsequent World War II, through the experience of the author’s father, Antonio. This graphic biography hails from the generation defined by war heroics, and one reads with the expectation of redemption. However, with the father’s suicide framing the narrative, and each chapter of his life noted with a passing floor as he falls, the reader is left to navigate a life of despair. Altarriba says, “It took my father ninety years to fall from the fifth floor.” The Art of Flying is...

Summer Reads

Rachel Tzvia Back, poet and translator, lives in the Galilee where her great-, great-, great-grandfather settled in the 1830s. She has published four poetry collections and four collections of translations, including the award-winning With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry and In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. The poems included here are from her new collection, entitled What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking. 4 With first rain after the winds, the stabbings, house demolitions, retaliatory shootings, politicians’ obscenities, targeted assassinations, random street killings – all pause. Garden weeds sprout suddenly to become a gracious green blanket spread over the deep creviced dirt. Only then do I note I have long since stopped noting the names of each day’s newly dead. 5 It was a long autumn. Winter refused to come. photo : stéphane chaumet summer reads WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 25 Summer weather has already arrived in Austin, and it’s the perfect excuse for WLT’s digital media editor, Jen Rickard Blair, to jump-start her annual summer reading list. Her selections this year include a “cli-fi”novel, a short-story collection, a podcast adapted to book, and poetry. Claire Vaye Watkins Gold Fame Citrus Riverhead Books, 2015 This debut novel by Claire Vaye Watkins is a realistic dystopia that follows the story of two young “Mojavs”—Luz and Ray—in the badlands of a drought-destroyed southern California. Her beautiful prose and enrapturing story is the recipe for an engrossing page-turner. Andrés Neuman The Things We Don’t Do Trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia Open Letter Books, 2015 I read Neuman’s Traveler of the Century a few years ago and have since been craving a dive into more of his captivating storytelling. The Things We Don’t Do is a short-story collection that contains a collection of unpredictable tales ranging from philosophical to playful. Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor Welcome to Night Vale Harper Perennial, 2015 I’m a longtime fan of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and am thrilled to discover the creators have spun their darkly funny and mysterious stories into a novel. The book is based in the same town in a nameless desert where ghosts, angels, the “glow cloud,” government conspiracies, and more intersect to create a mysterious atmosphere that could be likened to Twin Peaks or The Twilight Zone. Wisława Szymborska Map: Collected and Last Poems Trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015 I’ve been wanting to read more of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry, and this newly published collection includes the poems from her last Polish collection. I hope to encounter more of her wit and wisdom in these pages. ...