For The Point, Vikrant Dadawala writes about Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Laureate in Literature, how the Anglo-American press reacted to his win, and why his work should be read. European colonialism in eastern Africa is a major theme of his writing, but Dadawala emphasizes that “European languages and maps do not mark the limits of Gurnah’s literary universe. What really haunts Gurnah’s prose is the centuries-long layered history of Arab and Indian presence on the Swahili coast.”
Lynne Tillman’s next novel will be published by Peninsula Press in October. According to the publisher, Haunted Houses is a “witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood.”
In this week’s edition of 4Columns, Megan Milks reviews Melissa Febos’s new book Body Work: “It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it: ‘Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me.’ Binding their insights to Febos’s writing life, the four essay in Body Work are, then, as much about her body of work as they are about the art of embodied writing.”
Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky has conducted a series of interviews with the writers of Green Lamp, a group started by Odessa journalist Yevgeny Golubovsky, which you can read now at the Paris Review. The writers reflect on the first weeks of war in Ukraine.
On Thursday next week, Boston Review is celebrating the release of its annual arts anthology with free readings by Adebe DeRango-Adem, Simone Person, Meredith Talusan, Brian Teare, and Yiru Zhang.