A few years ago, Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs poked around the internet for a global map of the world’s rivers, one that categorized them based on their ocean destination. He came across maps of the major rivers plus others that captured the local footprint of individual streams. But he found nothing on a global scale with high resolution. “It’s like, how does this thing not exist? So, I just instantly put it on my to-do list,” he says.
Murnane has described his fiction as “no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of his mind”. This may seem blandly self-evident, but it is the quality of his descriptions and reflections on those contents that make his books so interesting; and it is a mistake to read them with a view to what they omit (plots, characters, issues) rather than what they include.
Set in Malaysia between 1935 and 1945, Vanessa Chan’s impressive and assured debut offers a little-told perspective on a turbulent period of history. Inspired by her own grandparents’ experiences under British colonial rule and Japanese occupation during the second world war, Chan – who lives in the US – captures the hope and the hardships of this extraordinary decade.
Such roaming, sentence-driven stories won’t work for everyone. The voice can at times overwhelm some traditional narrative pleasures. Characters don’t always feel fleshed out. Plots exist but can be so submerged in jumbled timelines that readers may scratch their heads. But anyone who enjoys poetry in prose, who feels enlivened by language and struck by sentences, will find much to admire in “Burn Man.”
One of the strengths of this book is its long view. This isn’t the glowing self-righteousness of the newly converted, nor is it the post-mortem of a couple who played with fire and burned everything to the ground. This is a marriage that has been open for six-plus years and remains so. The primary relationship that feels turned inside out is the author’s relationship with herself.
Eminently readable and always engaging, Failures of Forgiveness brings a care and clarity to the complex concept at its heart, ultimately asking us to enlarge the ways we understand—and practice—forgiveness. As Cherry admonishes in a line that becomes something like the book’s refrain, “Forgiveness does not always look the same in all cases.”
“I think alone is sexy,” writes Athena Dixon in the opening installment of her “memoir in essays,” The Loneliness Files (2023). It’s New Year’s Eve, 2021. The pandemic is at its peak, and Dixon, alone in her Philadelphia apartment, has donned a green dress and red lipstick. The poet and essayist drinks, dances, and watches the countdown with only herself for company—a solitary state she initially characterizes as “mysterious.”
Whether you have inhaled this kind of information for decades, as I have, or you’re a neophyte who only knows him as the author of Blowin’ in the Wind or Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine may fill you with as much surprise and delight as I got from it.