For The New York Times, I review Peace Adzo Medie’s second novel Nightbloom: “If family figures as one creditor in the novel, and the suppressed memory of rape another, then Medie intertwines the two, fingers welded in one devastating grip.”
Category: The New York Times Book Review
For The New York Times Book Review, I write on Code Switch co-founding editor Kat Chow’s memoir of grief and family, immigration and ancestors. Guided by the work of scholars in Asian American studies who have developed a theory of “racial melancholia,” elaborating on Freud, Chow links her own life and species of grief to their explanation of how identities are formed in immigrant families who try to preserve the memory of the places they left — in a sense to taxidermy the past. Seeing Ghosts gives flesh to this theory, the idea that loss of country and loss of loved ones can hook us with similar perpetual sorrow, through storytelling that brings alive both Chow’s mother and father, drawing their characters tenderly but with unflinching honesty.
For The New York Times Book Review, I consider poet Quyen Phan Que Mai’s debut in English, the novel “The Mountains Sing.”
For the New York Times Book Review, I wrote a piece about Valeria Luiselli’s novel in the shape of an archive and consider how it differs from other work (narrative nonfiction or testimonial poetry) that immerses us in the internal and external deserts that unaccompanied child migrants cross: “Which of us who has loved a child wouldn’t be moved by the evocative details of innocence snagged on the jagged fences of adult circumstance?”
Categories
Mother Lode
For the Sunday New York Times Book Review, I review a personal history of Ethiopia by Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam, as refracted through the life of the author’s grandmother.
