This Week’s Reviews

And the Bride Closed the Door
Ronit Matalon, trans. Jessica Cohen | New Vessel Press | 9781939931757 | October 2019
“One could tout the graces of Matalon’s novella on a number of fronts. Its layered brand of humor—part slapstick, part wit—seeps in and out of darkness with bite, yielding a compact tragicomedy on love and loss. While its characters may flirt with the cartoonish, they never quit the realm of plausibility: their foibles are utterly, achingly human. Its prose, translated by Man Booker Prize winner Jessica Cohen, is a deftly wielded knife.”—Asymptote Journal

Thukpa for All
Praba Ram and Sheela Preuitt, illus. Shilpa Ranade | Karadi Tales Picturebooks | 9788193388983 | October 2019

Thukpa for All is a beautiful story about community, compassion, and culture. . . . The illustrations throughout it, as well as on the cover, are detailed and alluring.”—Manhattan Book Review

Plummet
Sherwin Tija | Conundrum Press | 9781772620405 | October 2019

“Tija has concocted a perfect metaphorical fable for just living life and accepting that it’s a mysterious and absurd journey that we are thrust into.”—Comics Beat

Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World
Tosh Berman | City Lights Publishers | 9780872867604 | February 2019
“[Tosh Berman] adds a curious dual memoir to the genre’s history. . . . Were Tosh’s story adapted for the stage, the ideal dramatist for the job would be the late Sam Shepard, the bard of late twentieth-century family dysfunction.”—Art in America

Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River
Jung Young Moon, trans. Yewon Jung | Deep Vellum Publishing | 9781941920855 | December 2019
“In his trademark stream-of-consciousness style, Moon admirably grapples with himself and the peculiarities and paradoxes of twenty-first-century Texas, while questioning what has meaning and what doesn’t, who gets to decide, and the nature of the novel as a literary form.”—Lone Star Review
“Moon unravels the world of Texas and Dallas, recasting the familiar as alien and allowing readers to re-encounter this city and region through the eyes of a narrator who is disoriented by its otherworldliness.”—D Magazine

Collecting for a New World: Treasures of the Early Americas
 John Hessler | GILES | 9781911282396 | November 2019

“The pivotal moment in the 16th century, when Europeans and indigenous Americans first came into contact, is brought to life with John Hessler’s vivid descriptions of more than 60 rare items.”—Art Magazine

Crushing the Red Flowers
Jennifer Voigt Kaplan | Ig Publishing  | 9781632460943 | December 2019
The ambi­gu­i­ties which Kaplan explores in Crush­ing the Red Flow­ers refuse res­o­lu­tion. It is a tes­ta­ment to her skill as an author that her work acknowl­edges this truth and embraces the para­dox of her char­ac­ters’ dilemmas.”—Jewish Book Council

The Complete Gary Lutz
Gary Lutz | Tyrant Books | 9781733535915 | December 2019
“Gary Lutz is perhaps the best American writer of very short fictions.”—Epiphany
We must be grateful to Tyrant Books for putting all of Gary Lutz’s stories together in this volume—with the hope that The Complete Gary Lutz will be not so complete soon.”—Full Stop

The Buddhist Swastika and Hitler’s Cross: Rescuing a Symbol of Peace from the Forces of Hate
T.K. Nakagaki | Stone Bridge Press | 9781611720457 | September 2018
“This book is recommended for all libraries, especially those that have strong Holocaust collections and collections on interfaith relations.”—Association of Jewish Libraries

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