Sergio de la Pava – Lost Empress

American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava, works as a public defender in New York City, and calls on an intimate secondhand knowledge of the many different sorrows to be found in the ripples of a single criminal case. But Lost Empress is also […]

Sly Jazz

The National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, in Upstate New York, lays out the sport’s history like an allegory of the long American century, its tragedies and glories. A gallery with the feel of a mausoleum enshrines the finest 1 per cent of players. They came from farms and small towns and urban slums, […]

Alt-right rally in Washington, DC, August 2018

There was great anxiety over turnout among the organisers of the white power rally “Unite the Right 2,” the follow-up to the infamous event in Charlottesville last year. Key members of the movement, also known as the alt-right, were snubbing the event. “We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers […]

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 […]

The Secret Base

“So amazing that we’re ordering hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of new airplanes for the Air Force,” Trump said at a public military briefing in Hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico last October. “You can’t see it,” he claimed of the F-35, an extraordinarily costly and glitch-ridden project. “You literally can’t see it. So it’s hard to fight […]

Cynthia Ozick – Letters of Intent

Ozick was born in 1928, when the milk in her native Bronx was still delivered by horse and cart. Her father owned a drugstore, which “seemed one of the world’s permanent institutions. Who could have imagined that it would one day vanish into an aisle in the supermarket. . .?” The twenty-first century is largely absent […]

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 […]