Border Characters
Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (And Other Stories; Paper $13.95) is a deceptively small book—barely a hundred pages, with generous margins—and its prose is baked dry and hard,...
View ArticleThe Need of the Forgotten
Carmen Boullosa’s novels are bitter, brave, and hilarious, and they cannot be read lightly. For all her humor and wicked strangeness, Boullosa is drawn to violence and writes her novels in blood (which...
View ArticleBlindness and Vision
Sight is invisible, until it disappears. Then it becomes a blind spot. When the protagonist of Lina Meruane’s Seeing Red (Deep Vellum; $14.95) loses her vision suddenly (a blood vessel bursts in her...
View ArticleSubverting the Western: A Conversation With Hernan Diaz
There are some straightforward things you can say about Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance. It’s a Western—albeit a very strange and estranging one—and also a novel about language and...
View ArticleHow the US Exported Its Border Around the World
The border, in the abstract, can seem like a simple, objective thing, just a line on a map that gives a country its shape. And because securing and enforcing that line—what people call border...
View ArticleJedediah Purdy Has an Idea That Could Save Us From Capitalism and the Climate...
Jedediah Purdy’s 2015 book After Nature is about what we talk about when we talk about nature. Breaking the concept apart—historically, legally, philosophically, even aesthetically—Purdy makes us see...
View ArticleThe Trap of Climate Optimism
There’s a very specific kind of writing on climate change that we’ve probably all read, a realistic and pragmatic science journalism about the future we must stop from happening. It gives us facts,...
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