“Giuseppe Caputo's An Orphan World, translated by Juana Adcock and Sophia Hughes, is one of those novels about losing yourself in sex in order to find yourself in sex, that is also a genuinely strange and loving story of a father and son struggling to survive abject poverty and terrifying homophobia in Columbia.”

 

 

In a poverty-stricken neighbourhood wedged between the city and the sea, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. Rather than being discouraged by their difficulties and hardship, their response is to come up with increasingly bizarre and imaginative plans in order to get by. Even when a horrifying, macabre event rocks the neighborhood and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. What matters is staying together.

 

 

 

“A Grain of Wheat is Ngugi's novel about the so-called Mau Mau Revolt in Kenya, where the British killed hundreds of thousands of people and put half the population in concentration camps. As a story, A Grain of Wheat is actually an addictive page-turner. While this is a social realist narrative, one where the woman comes to represent the motherland, there is a surprising sense of irony, in particular when Ngugi writes in the register of the British characters. Similarly, the revolutionary hero who is positioned as the savior is also revealed as a psychopath, part of the novel's structural critique that under colonial conditions, there is no way to avoid complicity.”

 

 

Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.

 

 

 

 

Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism.

 

 

 

 

 

“You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“One of my gnawing anxieties is that 'the power of literature' is too often overstated by those of us who traffic in it. Ulitskaya’s novel provides a useful reminder that, at certain times and in certain places (such as post-Stalin Soviet Union), this would not have been a concern; it was known that literature was deadly serious. The friendship of three young boys across four decades provides the through-line of The Big Green Tent, enlivened by their various intimacies, the joy they find in art and music, and the great risks they take just to traffic in literature.”

 

 

With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya's remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys-—an orphaned poet, a gifted yet fragile pianist, and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled.

 

 

 

“Earlier this year I asked Twitter (who else) what were the best book-length essays. On this rare occasion, Twitter didn’t disappoint. I’ve made my way through a small fraction of all the books suggested, but my favorite remains Namwali Serpell’s Stranger Faces, which I love down to the syntactical level. Written for Transit Books’ Undelivered Lecture series (all fantastic), Serpell takes us away from “The Ideal Face”—site of truth, relationality, and beauty—to those titular stranger faces. From the Elephant Man to Psycho to the emoji, Serpell offers a theory and reading of their uncanny likeness, their doublings, their meanings. Along the way, Serpell quietly provides a correction to our pervasive cultural emphasis on empathy. For as she argues, via the stranger face, it is precisely in granting humanity to the other that we know how to humiliate them.”

 

 

 

 

“The other day, they were posing a question: does the continent have an epic? It may have a lament: Inventory, the finest of Dionne Brand’s book-length poems.”

 

 

In Dionne Brand’s incantatory, deeply engaged, beautifully crafted long poem, the question is asked, What would an inventory of the tumultuous early years of this new century have to account for? Alert to the upheavals that mark those years, Brand bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms, the nameless casualties that bloom out from near and distant streets. An inventory in form and substance, Brand’s poem reckons with the revolutionary songs left to fragment, the postmodern cities drowned and blistering, the devastation flickering across TV screens grown rhythmic and predictable. Inventory is an urgent and burning lamentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr.—New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation"—takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South. Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America's apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people. The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it.