Francisco goldman – monkey boy

The action of the novel takes place over a long weekend in the mid-2000s, as the middle-aged Goldberg travels up to Boston to visit his declining mother, meets other characters from his past, and reminisces along the way. His current preoccupations – his career and several recent failed romances – are set against the legacy […]

Evan osnos – wildland

Many Americans know exactly how their society ended up in its current state of dysfunction and division: it’s all thanks to the Other Party, and the irresponsibility or evil of its politicians and voters. But there are also those with no clear theory of what went wrong. Many middle-aged political moderates, for instance, spent the […]

Jon Sopel – Unpresidented

What is the point, really, in 2021, of a British journalist in the United States? With no language barrier to straddle, and all the cultural cross-pollination of the internet – including easy access to the work of the US’s own, better-funded and more knowledgeable journalists – what can these interlopers add to the picture? Perhaps […]

Sarah Broom – The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom’s grandmother, known as Lolo, was born in 1915 or 1916, in a village founded by freed slaves on a bend of the Mississippi River. In the 1880s, a single family had built “a self-sufficient community composed of four dirt streets, named in the order in which they appeared: First, Second, Third, Fourth”, […]

Fernanda Melchor – Hurricane Season

In 1950 Octavio Paz wrote about “a magical word” with “innumerable meanings” in Mexican culture. This was chingar, for which the English verb “to fuck” provides a dull shadow of a translation. “Who is the Chingada [the fucked one]?” Paz asked rhetorically. “Above all, she is the Mother.” Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) contains a long […]

Tony Horwitz – Spying on The South

In the early 1850s, as America slid towards civil war, a young reporter for what was then the New-York Daily Times journeyed through the slave states. He hoped to gain a “reliable understanding of the sentiments and hopes & fears” among their people, and “promote the mutual acquaintance of the North and South”. What he saw of […]

Francisco Cantú – The Line Becomes a River

Carlos Fuentes imagined a Border Patrol Agent so racist that he feared a suntan. “Agent Dan Polonsky” prefers to work nocturnally; he likes to watch himself urinate through the otherworldly lens of his night-vision goggles. Polonsky “detested the illegals. But he adored and needed them. Without them, damn it, there would be no budget for […]

Antonio Muñoz Molina – Like a Fading Shadow

Ray is there blundering in and out of flophouses and trying to find passage to Africa. He pores over spy novels ‘where the brand of everything the characters carry or use is detailed’ (as well as autohypnosis manuals, and the adverts in Life magazine). They are both living in fantasy worlds, with ‘that delirious belief… that real […]

Juan Villoro – The Reef

Juan Villoro’s first work of fiction to be translated into English, The Guilty (2015), features seven short stories narrated by seven middle-aged men. The men are all very tired: jaded, often reduced by past or dormant addictions, or physically injured in ways both mundane and dramatic (a past-it journeyman footballer’s “body isn’t normal, it’s a kicked-in lump”, […]

2 Books by César Aira

The Proof, written in 1989, opens with a nerdy 16-year-old girl walking at dusk down a city street thronged with other teenagers. Marcia feels herself slowing down ‘through the soft resistance of the light and darkness, silence and the glances exchanged between face and face’. Suddenly, she is crudely accosted by two lesbian ‘punks’. The […]