I have two recent reviews out:
For Colorado Review, I wrote about Krys Malcolm Belc’s memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint Press).
For Heavy Feather Review, I wrote about Claudia Rankine’s lyrical hybrid work, Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press), out this week in paperback.
I have a new review in the latest issue of Newfound. In it, I look at Jason Diamond’s book The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs in conversation with the 2017 film Suburbicon. You can read the review here, and better yet, you can read the entire issue.
Diamond’s The Sprawl is available through Coffee House Press.
I had a number of things published in the past few days around the web:
For the Lunch Ticket blog, I wrote about what it means to sit alone in my room listening to music and how it connected me to the wider world. You can read it here.
For Issue IV of Variety Pack, I wrote a review essay about some books that have helped me learn how to grieve in a nation that does not grieve well. I considered Marion Winik’s The Big Book of the Dead, alongside Camus’ The Plague, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
For The Adroit Journal, I reviewed Melissa Valentine’s wonderful memoir The Names of All the Flowers, which has stayed with me since I read it last July.
Thanks to all of you who choose to read.
– Ben
In my latest for the The Athenaeum Review, I looked at two titles in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, short books on single albums. I had some fun collapsing the intellectual distance between Nine Inch Nails and Arcade Fire in writing about their albums, Pretty Hate Machine and The Suburbs, respectively. Daphne Carr’s book on Pretty Hate Machine lands in my top three of the series, alongside Marvin Lin’s book on Kid A and Kirk Walker Graves’ book on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
You can read the review here.
Ben Lewellyn-Taylor 