Notes on Books

Essays View all essays
  1. 01
    Essay

    Business Continues: Ten Novels and the Speed of Harm

    Violence converted into procedure across ten novels, from a Brazilian slaughterhouse to a predator whose vocabulary outlives him.

  2. 02
    Essay

    Explanation Under Pressure

    An event occurs without becoming motive. Explanation is demanded, but the act remains without justification.

  3. 03
    Essay

    Reading Queer Life

    How queer life in literature is shaped by scrutiny, secrecy, attachment, violence and memory across the archive.

Archive 124 reviews · sorted by date · author-indexed Browse archive →

Fernanda Melchor

Hurricane Season

A woman's murder narrated as folklore, exposing the contempt that made her killable long before anyone raised a knife.

Makenna Goodman

Helen of Nowhere

A disgraced professor's self-knowledge restaged as evidence, ending in a shape borrowed from every story about men like him.

Munir Hachemi

The Mulai

An archaeologist's report passed off as ethnography, compiling a whole society out of one man's failure to tell people apart.

Babak Lakghomi

South

Political injury reassigned as private failure, each record altered before it can testify, until only the safer account survives in print.

Sandor Karacsony

The Watching Monad

A colleague's fear read as desire, alternating narration turning workplace access into administratively easy pursuit.

Claire Keegan

Foster

A summer of care staged as rescue, ending in a child carrying a measure her own family need never meet.

Ana Paula Maia

Bury Your Dead

A roadside depot grinds animal carcasses while human corpses wait on a morgue van that never starts. Dignity falls to whoever will carry a body.

Keith Ridgway

Dooneen

A wounded man writes from a cliff-cut room as Dublin’s housing uprising ends in massacre and contested record.

Marlon James

The Disappearers

A rehearsal room in 1988 Kingston becomes the site of an attack whose aftermath spreads through aliases, testimony, revenge and return.