In this beautiful, fascinating book by Jay Cantor (no relation, though I would like to claim him), Kafka is a haunting ghost. In the first story, Kafka, dying from tuberculosis, tells Max Brod that he and his lover Dora Diamant intend to open a restaurant in Tel Aviv: he will wait tables and Dora will cook! A charming, hopeful image, but really the story is about death, and Kafka’s demand that Brod, as literary executor (“literary executioner,” Brod says), destroy his work when the time comes. The time comes soon enough and most of the book concerns Kafka’s half-life: his effect on two of the women he loved—Dora Diamant and Milena Jasenska, both brutalized by history. Engaging, heart-breaking, witty, and wise.Smith Henderson, author of “Fourth of July Creek” (Ecco)
“The Bully of Order,” by Brian Hart (Harper)Saeed Jones, author of “Prelude to Bruise” (Coffee House Press)
Every time I read the opening lines of Jericho Brown’s new poetry collection, “The New Testament,” “I don’t remember how I hurt myself, / the pain mine / long enough for me / to lose the wound that invented it,” I also hear the echoes of protesters shouting “I can’t breathe.” This book — a progression of the blues-informed lyricism of Brown’s debut collection, “Please,” — is about black men in pain and love, often at the same time. To say this book is one of the best I read this year is to say, I’ve been clutching these poems against my chest as I find a way to breathe in this burning country.Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of “My Struggle: Book Three” (Archipelago)
”The Emerald Light in the Air,” by Donald Antrim, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Antonya Nelson, author of “Funny Once” (Bloomsbury USA)Egg nog gave him heartburn and champagne gave him a headache and all that stop-motion animation just gave him the creeps: it was the way the mouths moved, like the chomp-chomp laughter of a ventriloquist’s dummy. But once the decorations were down, he settled into the only ritual that saved the whole ho-ho-hopeless season: a circle in the yard cleared of snow, the tang of gasoline and pinesap, the snap of dry branches, beer cans blackening in the embers, and the blessed heat of that 60-dollar Scotch pine glowing more beautifully than ever, its needles outlined in flame.
Brendan Mathews is the author of “The World of Tomorrow” and “Leavetakings,” both forthcoming from Little, BrownAs usual, whenever she entered the room his heart would go all heat-miser on him — it would positively melt. The next moment, however, as she brushed past him, or spoke over his shoulder as though he wasn’t even there, it was cold-miser all over again.”
Johanna Skibsrud is the author, most recently, of the novel “Quartet for the End of Time”Depending on whom you ask, the critics ranged from lukewarm to downright hostile in their reviews. The choreography was dismissed as “confusing” in some scenes, the libretto was deemed “lopsided,” and the grumpy reviewer sent by the St. Petersburg Gazette called it “the most tedious thing I have ever seen.” When the revolution broke out a few years later, the theater stopped performing the ballet altogether, and many dancers lost their jobs. How, then, with such an unpropitious beginning, did “The Nutcracker” become the most performed ballet of all time, and a holiday tradition for even non-balletomanes?
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 fairy tale, on which the ballet is based, is troubling: Marie, a young girl, falls in love with a nutcracker doll, whom she only sees come alive when she falls asleep. In one gruesome battle between this nutcracker prince and the seven-headed mouse king, Marie falls, ostensibly in a fevered dream, into a glass cabinet, cutting her arm badly. She hears stories of trickery, deceit, a rodent mother avenging her children’s death, and a character who must never fall asleep (but of course does, with disastrous consequences). While she heals from her wound, the mouse king brainwashes her in her sleep. Her family forbids her from speaking of her “dreams” anymore, but when she vows to love even an ugly nutcracker, he comes alive and she marries him. The two of them leave her real life forever to live in the doll kingdom. Marie is a specter of a character, a girl who exists only to take care of her imagined prince, a girl who vanishes, disempowered and subjugated, to a kingdom ruled by dolls.