(Books of The Times): At the 1994 reception for the prestigious Kyoto Prize, awarded for achievements that contribute to humanity, French mathematician André Weil turned to his fellow honoree, film director Akira Kurosawa, and said: “I have a great advantage over you. I can love and admire your work, but you cannot love and admire my work.”
(Books of The Times): A man is falling from the sky, falling slowly, like a petal. He lands on the sands of an unknown desert with his torn parachute, more dead than alive. There is no sign of his American fighter plane, its American bombs. He is frighteningly calm.
(Books of The Times): Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat. During that same period, in the United States, more than three times as many women died at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends.
(Critic's Notebook): In “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, the narrator, a writing teacher, grumbles about her students’ personal essays on sexual violence. Always the same nouns, she complains to us (<em>scar</em>, <em>bruise</em>, <em>blood</em>), always the same verbs (<em>choke</em>, <em>starve</em>, <em>scream</em>). The dull, depressing sameness of these stories. Their horrifying number.
(Books of The Times): They were called the “ghost rapes.” In 2005, Mennonite women living in a secluded colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding, with dirty fingerprints on their bodies and fraying rope around their wrists.
(Books of The Times): “I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems,” Philip Larkin once complained. “It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”
Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of a sharply drawn novel, “The Residue Years,” and a new memoir, “Survival Math.” Questions of translating his experience have long preoccupied him.
Long before the Harlem Renaissance, Hartman writes, “before white folks journeyed uptown to get a taste of the other, before F. Scott Fitzgerald and Radclyffe Hall and Henry Miller,” these women were reconceiving the possibilities for private life.
There was no subtle creep of sadness to watch for, however. What happened was blunt and nightmarish.Months after the book was published, in 2017, Li’s 16-year-old son killed himself.
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