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Thoughtful takes on books, art, and culture—highlighting works that challenge, delight, and deserve your attention.
Book Review: “Cleaving the Clouds”
Margaret Anne Kean’s chapbook, Cleaving the Clouds, is a record-keeping, an elegy, and a deep investigation of grief written in response to the loss of her parents, who passed away within a span of 27 days during the COVID pandemic. At the start, the poems remind me of my first…
Album Review: “I Have Some Thoughts”
I’m old now. It’s been many years since I first realized I was not like other people. That realization was rather shocking since we are raised to believe that everyone is pretty much the same, we’re cut from the same cloth, and we see the world in pretty much the…
Book Review: “Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story”
“One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines,” Leslie Jamison writes. “We trade in the scripts we’ve written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.” This line appears in “The Real Smoke,” from her 2019 collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn. “The Real…
Book Review: “Songs of Seven Days”
If “Songs of Seven Days” is your first poetic encounter with this writer, you might be forgiven if you’d quickly skimmed his bio (the words “Dominican friar” leap to the fore), glued that to the “Genesis/creation” theme of the book and assumed it was a stiff, albeit reverential, religious collection…
Book Review: “Immigrant Prodigal Daughter”
There’s a tender fragility and quiet strength woven into the words of each poem in Lucia Cherciu’s Immigrant Prodigal Daughter, as one might expect from such a vulnerable title. From Romania to New York, Cherciu reveals a heart divided into old and new worlds. This beautiful, moving book is presented…
Book Review: “Lost in Obscurity and Other Stories”
Lost in Obscurity and Other Stories by Debasish Mishra (2022) is both touching and bittersweet. This book is not just a “collection” of disjointed short stories but rather a clever coordination that tie events and characters together. For example, Chottu and Raju, two childhood friends in the first story, “The…
Book Review: “Afterparties: Stories”
By now, most readers of Anthony Veasna So’s 2021 Afterparties know he died of a drug overdose shortly before his debut collection went to press. His death, in some ways, has created a narrative of a writer taken too soon, and many reviews of his collection, in fact, focus on…
Album Review: “Dead Calm”
Lord Almighty, you can’t take the country out of this boy (not that he himself hasn’t tried). New Zealand-born, Texas-bred and California-beckoned Austin Leonard Jones has moseyed his way through all shades of lo-fi music, pop and otherwise, but on his latest album — Dead Calm (Perpetual Doom) — he fully commits…
Album Review: “Rancho Shalom”, “Lucky Nights”, “Ghost Approaches”
World, meet Evan Kertman. His debut album, Rancho Shalom (Perpetual Doom), invites the listener out onto the back patio to bask in his sun-dappled California country-folk glow. Chamber pop instrumentation charms and the clean West Coast-style production shimmers. Radio-ready tracks “Only The Birds” and “The Same Song” hint at jangle pop and psychedelia, respectively, but the…
Book Review: “His Excellency Eugène Rougon”
I’ve been reading Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” series at the rate of about one a year. This one is the sixth one. I guess I have another fourteen years to go before the thrilling conclusion! This one is concerned with politics in the early years of the Second Empire, when Napoleon’s dumbass…
Book Review: “Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz”
Today, more than seventy-five years after the liberation of the concentration camps and roughly sixty-five years after the closure of the last of the DP camps in Germany, we find ourselves at a juncture in history that one would be tempted to call unprecedented — Americans taking to the streets,…
Book Review: “In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy”
Liberalism! The great empty hole in many radicals’ understanding of the political spectrum. In many respects, we treat it like a fact of life, like the weather, but also as something ephemeral, something that will just go away as soon as the real shit, the facts, the structural realities, assert…
Book Review: “The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World”
Who does half-smart like a renegade Trotskyite? From what I can tell of his biography, James Burnham didn’t come to Trotskyism the way you think a political figure born in the first decade of the twentieth century might — after becoming a Communist and growing disgusted by Stalinism. No, he…
Book Review: “Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border”
In the summer of 1975, doctoral student James A. Sandos happened upon carbon copies of the first two volumes of the three-volume 1919 report, “An Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force” while conducting research at the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. The report was one result of a legislative inquiry…
Seven Short Book Reviews
A well-crafted debut novel that puts us inside the mind of a young single mother. Who happens to have murdered another child when she was eight. Puts the reader in mind of several famous cases, but deftly sidesteps any comparisons to exploitative, lurid, ripped-from-the-headlines pulp.
Book Review: “The Constitution of Liberty”
It’s honestly getting to be like Charlie Brown and the football, me and these right-wing intellectuals. I mean it when I say I expect more from these people. I didn’t expect the world from Hayek. I know how much a “Nobel” in economics is worth. The Road to Serfdom might…
Audiobook Review: “High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies”
Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for…
Short Book Reviews
Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t quite prove the famous Fredric Jameson quote used as Ministry for the Future’s epigraph incorrect but he does offer a readable speculative future centered around contemporary struggles. I fear the happy ending comes all too easily (it is science fiction) even if one were to calculate…
Book Review: “Mainstreaming Black Power”
I read this out of a desire to get a more finely-grained picture of the recession of the Black Freedom Movement in the 1970s, and what came after. The more I think of it, the more I think that this defeat shaped everything that came after, in much the same…
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Book Review: “Semiotic Love [Stories]”
Semiotic Love, published by Austin’s Awst Press, is a collection of flash and micro fiction that ranges over a wide variety of human relationships — specifically, love in its myriad forms. The recurrent theme, at least among the larger pieces, seems to be that of communication within these relationships. The…