An Invitation to Forgetting
The specter of forgetting has haunted every advance we have made in externalizing our memories.
All Reviews
Ambush Haircuts
Punk’s devotees had a lot invested in how things were turning out; one’s music of choice was a territory to be defended...
Elephant Families
Triplets
Days of Infamy: John Dower's "Cultures of War"
John Dower’s Cultures of War avoids the pitfalls of doing history by analogy.
Mapping the Bay Area
Snappy and Reckless: Richard Hallas’s “You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up”
The drifter, unfulfilled desire, misplaced guilt, a greed-ridden culture, street-level perspective — distilled into a coherent, kaleidoscopic whole.
Place of Grace
Richard’s amazing new memoir, House of Prayer No. 2, avoids the Old South clichés.
Surviving the Cultural Revolution: Xiaoda Xiao’s “The Visiting Suit”
Xiao's powerful memoir of his years at a forced labor camp is written in unflinching, unadorned prose that ably conveys the horrors he witnessed.
Droll Ontology
Desire and despair smolder fulvous, pungent and sulphuric in Gronk’s black and white.
The Incompleat Cynic: David Rakoff's "Half Empty"
Deceptively Simple
Like her earlier works, Bad Marie is human, deeply-felt, delightfully well-honed, and though stylized, stops short of quirkiness for quirkiness’ sake.
Lighting Darkened Corners
Aslan's collection makes clear that the Arab Spring of 2011 reflects a century spent grappling with a postcolonial search for identity.
Aberrant Behavior: On Alex Toth
I knew Toth — not all that well, but well enough to realize at a certain point that avoiding contact with him was a positive and healthy lifestyle.
Sons and Fathers
Miller is a classicist; he loves the melodrama of the comics form.
Romeo Byron Is Dead: Jessica Hagedorn’s “Toxicology”
Hagedorn's lean, quick chapters and impressionistic scenes have the effect of sound bytes, and perfectly complement the tone of her world.