Michelle is an editor, writer and museum educator at Dia Beacon.
Transporting the reader out of the dispiriting news cycle of the present instant, Kathleen Jamie instead reels us back to a perspective on time and human presence that is vast and compassionate. For those who fear our world is disappearing, Jamie ponders how lost cultures from past ages come around again in the spiral of time.
-Michelle
This shape-shifter of a tale begins with an apocalyptic (and frighteningly plausible) fever and quickly morphs into a dark satire of latter-day capitalism crossed with a moving examination of loss. Severance twists the mundane world of office work and consumerism and wrings from it elegant and searing observations on identity, immigration, displacement and motherhood.
-Michelle
While waiting for Ali Smith’s next installment in her Four Season Quartet, think of How to Be Both as an amuse-bouche. Inventive, witty and deeply felt. The ground this novel covers—from a quattrocento painter to a modern-day London teen mourning her 60s wild-child mother—will leave you wanting to shuffle the book’s sections and read it again for new possibilities.
-Michelle
Little known fact: the artist Louise Bourgeois created countless sculptures and drawings of spiders as a way to memorialize her beloved mother. If you've seen Bourgeois' spiders -- there's one at Dia:Beacon -- you'll know that the image conjures up a myriad of emotions and conditions. Likewise, this gossamer novel, Now, Now, Louison, is a portrait of the passions and preoccupations of the artist herself rather than a straight biographical account. A tale spun for the spider-maker.
-Michelle
Difficult to find
By turns wacky, bracing, sardonic and poignant, these brief but satisfying short stories come to us in the voice of a friend who tells it like it is. Sometimes the world of these stories is full of setbacks and missed connections, often it's loopy and outrageous, and always it's painfully, hopefully human.
-Michelle
One of the most unforgettable books of 2019. Reviewers should reserve the word “searing” only for works like this -- but the more striking feat is how Toews manages to begin with a shattering premise and advance through humor and insight toward redemption.
-Michelle