Reviews – Tate Street

In The Margins E9: Sound Like Yourself: An Interview with Graywolf Press

Graywolf Press is a leading independent publisher of contemporary American and international literature. In this episode we talk with Executive Editor Jeff Shotts to learn how they discover and work with leading writers such as Eula Biss and Claudia Rankine. We also learn how their non-profit status allows them freedom to work at the leading edge of the art and what he means when he suggests writers "Sound Like Yourself". [...]

Phlrp! (Sprezzatura by Mike Young)

In Sprezzatura, his latest collection of poetry, Mike Young finds strange wonder in the cultural decay of the American present. [...]
Curious George (Tenth of December by George Saunders)

In his latest collection, Tenth of December (Random House), George Saunders pulls back on some of the outlandishness of his earlier stories, though not on his idiosyncratic [...]

A Prison Wherever He Turned (Stoner by John Williams)

July 22, 2017

The plot of John Williams’ 1965 novel, Stoner (NYRB Classics, 2006): Young man becomes assistant professor at University of Missouri, lives unhappy life, has undistinguished career, dies. You can hardly be blamed if you don’t find this particularly enticing, but make no mistake: Stoner (last name of the protagonist—sorry to disappoint) is a work of almost unbearable beauty. [...]
I’ll Come Back Once You’re Dead (Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanual Bove, trans. Alyson Waters)
So Fearsome a Blue; or, From Grandmother’s House We Go (Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore)
The American Uncanny (American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen)

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