Асако Серидзава0.0 Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war.
Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories is designed to speak to the others, contesting assumptions and illuminating the complicated ways we experience, interpret, and pass on our personal and shared histories. A retired doctor, for example, is forced to confront the horrific moral consequences of his wartime actions. An elderly woman subjects herself to an interview, gradually revealing a fifty-year old murder and its shattering aftermath. And in the last days of a doomed war, a prodigal son who enlisted against his parents' wishes survives the American invasion of his island outpost, only to be asked for a sacrifice more daunting than any he imagined.
Меймей Берсенбрюгге0.0 A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”
Хафиза Гетер0.0 <P>Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian-Muslim woman and a Black man born into a Southern Baptist family in the Jim Crow South and George Wallace's Alabama, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems complicated by migration, language, racism, queerness, loss, belief and lapsed faith, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Amidst considerations of family and country, Geter weaves in testimonies for Black victims of police brutality, songs of lament that hone each tragedy and like Antigone, demand we bear intimate witness to the ethical failings of the state. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, we witness Geter lace the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord in a collection rich with unflinching intimacy that, turning outward to face the country, examines how all of this is, like the speaker herself, stretched between the context of two nations. This collection that thrums with authenticity and heart.</P>
Суванкхам Тхаммавонгса3.6 Featuring stories that have appeared in Harper's, Granta, and The Paris Review, this revelatory debut collection from O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa establishes her as an essential new voice in Canadian and world literature.
A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he'll never afford. A mother who works nights alongside her daughter, harvesting worms. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her startling debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa vividly captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance--and, above all, their pursuit of a place to belong. In spare, intimate prose charged with emotional power and a sly wit, she paints an indelible portrait of watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures, languages, and values. Told with compassion, wry humour, and an unflinching eye for the often absurd realities of having to start your life over again, these stories honour characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world."
A daughter becomes an unwilling accomplice in her mother's growing infatuation with country singer Randy Travis. After a boxer loses his dream of becoming a championship fighter, he finds an unexpected chance at redemption while working at his sister's nail salon. When a seventy-year-old woman begins a relationship with her much younger neighbour, her assumptions about the limits of love unravel. As he watches his wife gradually drift into an affair with her boss, a school bus driver must grapple with what he's willing to give up in order to belong. And in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize-shortlisted title story, a young girl's unconditional love for her father transcends the fickleness of language.
Unsentimental yet tender, and fiercely alive, How to Pronounce Knife announces Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most striking voices of her generation.
