“The Shadow King” by Maaza Mengiste
Ethiopian-born novelist Maaza Mengiste has just burst onto the literary scene with her magnificent novel “The Shadow King”. (An increasingly large number of African, and/or African-born writers, mostly women, are astonishing the literary world with their fiction; “The Old Drift”, by Namwali Serpell, is another example from 2019, surely to be on most everyone’s best […]
“Union Station”, “The Topeka School” and “The Grammarians”
I’m learning that when “The New York Times Book Review” tells its readers that new books are experimental, or are breaking new boundaries in the structures of the work, or that the writers are breaking new ground in either short fiction (Zadie Smith’s new stories in “Union Station” or the novel itself (Ben Lerner’s “The […]
“Find Me” by Andre Aciman
Two of the most sophisticated and beautifully written novels, both dealing with the dynamics of desire, sexuality, gender, and a strong emphasis on memory and time–appeared recently. “Find Me”, Andre Aciman’s sequel of sorts to his wildly successful “Call Me By Your Name” (which was also made into a much-praised movie), contains some of the […]