Category: Book Review

Book Review by Jessica Schneider
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A sepia-toned mugshot of Malcolm X from 1944, with the text "Malcolm X: A Retrospective," to serve as the banner for poet Jessica Schneider's modern re-assessment of Malcolm X's "Autobiography".

Words & Worlds Rearranged: Reviewing “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”

Know your place. 

For anyone ever having felt a surge of anger, one must wonder what is at the root of it. I know what mine is, but ask yourself, reader, what has caused you to feel such a way? I imagine the reason differs among individuals, but for me, it has always been due to not being believed or taken seriously, especially with regard to my talents. I can recall in a previous job, for example, being patronized and condescended to, and presumed to know or understand less than I do. Yet even were I to demonstrate evidence to the contrary (such as displaying a certain knowledge or skill), it would be downplayed as mere luck, or just belittled entirely. Know your place. Perhaps this can be equated to misogyny, but I think it goes further—and rather, it becomes a challenge of rank. After all, if one is unable to challenge another’s intellect, rank will be next, e.g., ‘you lack money/prestige/title/said degrees.’

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley is a book that touches upon these very themes, albeit quite differently. This is what makes the writing so universal in its appeal, as readers do not need to be of a particular race or rank to identify or appreciate the ideas herein. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, NE to Earl and Louise Little. Earl, a preacher, shows himself to be belligerent to all his children save for Malcolm, and Louise, due to her pride, often rejects handouts—looking for any other way to keep her family alive. Suffering a nervous breakdown, she spent 26 years in the State Mental Hospital, resulting from the societal difficulties she endured. Malcolm, upon seeing her for the last time, observes: […]

Book Review by Waqas Jani
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A stylized cover of Monica Wood's "When We Were the Kennedys", her memoir on growing up in Mexico, Maine.

Music of Having Been: on Monica Wood’s “When We Were the Kennedys”

Growing up in a place where the white man was looked to as this intellectual superman, I was always a step ahead in my hunt of not only white writers, but also white readers. This included reaching out to strangers on Facebook from places as well-known as New York and as unheard of as Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and getting a ‘fuck you’ in reply. Of course, the blame was on me; lacking discretion and proper English, I probably came across as some stalker or a creep. And this was the late 2000s, a time when social media was still a relatively insular place. But then again, I was also from a culture where you want to know everything in the first conversation, down to one’s salary. Soon, however, I would cover this gap along with millions of other Pakistanis in what I would later come to know as the Americanization of the mind. I had now picked up this sensibility and was able to think and react in American terms.

Such dissonance was amplified the more white writers I read – writers like John Green, Stephen Chbosky, David Levithan, Sarah Dessen, Rainbow Rowell, and their ilk hijacked my idea of literature. But how was I to write about the high school, the beach, the downtown, much less suffuse it all with my own Americana? Reading in the semi-desert of rural Sindh, Monica Wood’s “When We Were the Kennedys” is the kind of book that might have given me a direction, if not an answer. Sharing the same exterior as the above-mentioned white-and-alive scribblers, Wood has that abracadabra for real literature with slice-of-life moments that my adolescent mind sought in the confines of YA fiction. But then again, it’s too unfair a comparison, as Monica Wood is a great writer; and, having read some of her books, this great memoir is likely her greatest work. It immediately put me in mind of Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” and Dan Schneider’s “Tumbleweeds”. No, it doesn’t reach their heights, but stakes out its own territory, and is a worthy kindred in its panorama—this time, the 1960s America of Mexico, Maine. […]

Book Review by Su Zi
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The stylized cover of Jillian Weise's poetry colleiction, "Pills and Jacksonvilles", which touches on disability concerns.

Ultimate Marginalization: “Pills and Jacksonvilles” by Jillian Weise

Social erasure is the aim of marginalization, and there’s no greater social erasure than disability. Recent folk heroes notwithstanding, in the exhaustively annotated essay “No Planet Without Us”, Anna Landre states “…we need to become comfortable with the fact that disability will become part of all of our stories. Every single person will become disabled…Disability is as universal and inevitable as our changing climate.” And while a Rolling Stone article gives the aforementioned folk hero his disability card in the essay title (“Luigi Mangione Wrote Online about a Spine Disorder. Other Patients Say It’s Hell: Spondylolisthesis, or a slipped vertebra, can have devastating effects on the body—and the US health care system often makes things worse”), being disabled often results in erasure; reports from disaster areas highlight failures in disaster management that are often fatal to the disabled. And while current mob-think scapegoating has bubbled into bloodthirst, the institutionalization of the eugenicist view has resulted in denial of care and medical execution. […]

Poetry by Su Zi
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The Egyptian American poet Hedy Habra smiling next to her book, "The Taste of the Earth".

Identity Poetry: On Hedy Habra’s “The Taste of the Earth”

It might be an offense to purists, but the identity of an author tends to precede interactions with written work because of the nature of books: the cover giving the name, and how readers see cultures in names. Whether or not the work is allowed to speak requires the reader to open the book.

There is a moment when a choice is made: whether or not to even pick up a book, whether or not to open a book. If the author has a photo on the cover, there’s the reader’s personal response to the symbols in that photograph—it is a flat image that we see as symbols; the type of human, the accessories in the image that speak to details of that person. This formulation occurs before the words of the text are ever revealed. […]

Film by Alex Sheremet
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The cover of Bruce Ario's "Selected Poems" alongside a photo of a bearded Bruce Ario from the 1970s or 1980s.

The Minneapolis Poet: Bruce Ario’s “Selected Poems” Now Available

Bruce Ario’s “Selected Poems (1980 – 2022)” is now available for purchase from AUTOMACHINATION publishing. It features  a major, 150-page essay from his literary executor, Dan Schneider, examining Bruce Ario’s life and work. Our film, “From There To There: Bruce Ario, the Minneapolis Poet”, is also available for streaming on Patreon. You can watch the film’s latest trailer on our YouTube channel or learn more about the film here. The first part of Dan Schneider’s introduction to Bruce Ario as writer is reproduced below: […]

Book Review by Ezekiel Yu
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A stylized shot of a soldier observing a flower, from Alan Bridges's "The Return of the Soldier", adapted from the novel by Rebecca West.

The Mind’s Isle: On Rebecca West’s “The Return of the Soldier” (1918)

Near the end of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, a doctor from London is brought in to solve the very curious case of a middle-aged English officer, Chris Baldry: shell-shock has reverted his mind back to its twenty-year-old self, where he cannot, beyond the most banal specificities, recall his life after that point, not even his own beautiful wife, Kitty; nor can he fully appreciate how age has changed the face of his adoring cousin and childhood playmate, Jenny, who is the narrator of the tale.

As far as Captain Baldry is concerned, in fact, he is still in love with Margaret Allington, a lower-class girl who lived in a place not far from the family estate called Monkey Island, where she and her father humbly kept an inn. Chris and Margaret were fervently in love, until they were not, for reasons the novella takes its time in revealing.

Chris wants nothing more than to see Margaret, to the ire of his socially refined yet spiritually malnourished wife. It is Chris’s love for Margaret, and her cautious acceptance of it—as she is much older now, and married herself—that stokes Kitty’s hatred, inspiring her to throw specialists at the newly-young Chris until she finds the one who will finally sever the knot of her husband’s mind, Dr. Gilbert Anderson. […]

Book Review by Su Zi
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A colorized photo of American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Centennial F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Cursory Look At Two Titles

Our cultural traditions demark one hundred years as a test of a certain validity, as an initiation into inclusion in the pantheon of the highest achievements of our species. Oftentimes, a delightful retrospective of detail can be found in work that celebrates such an anniversary, but what if the culture changes? If an author uses a term that has fallen into disfavor, into taboo language or thought, does the entirety of the work become void of value?

While F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been celebrated through inclusion in classroom anthologies, with one novel in contemporary Hollywood, other aspects of the author’s work, other titles, might not be as generally well known. Fitzgerald himself has the dedication of an institution to collect critiques, there is a biography of his later years by S. Graham, and, in the kind of hall of mirrors of academic publishing, there’s a critique of critiques by C. Jackson as early as 1951. These are academic readings; however, not all who read are institutionalized, and should Fitzgerald still be read out in the wild, in a culture so different from ours now, another wad of print among the plethora is available. […]

Book Review by Ezekiel Yu
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A copy of Katherine Paterson's "Bridge to Terabithia" on a straw mat, with an excerpt of Ezekiel Yu's book review: "It's sad, because I would've benefitted from a book like Bridge to Terabithia if I'd had the chance wisdom to read it as a kid. Many other kids have, and I regret that it was my choice to limit myself to the sensationalisms of genre when books like Katherine Paterson's had other things to offer."

The Swinging-Over: Reviewing Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia”

It was a book, to be frank, that I shied away from, as a kid. As a kid, I wanted real fantasy. What that means is, I wanted fantasy where the astonishing worlds the characters go to are tangible, and the monsters they fight draw blood, and the heroes they become reach that status because they defied death, not because they surrendered to it.

I remember sitting in front of the TV and watching the trailer for this movie where a sad-looking dark-haired boy meets a shimmering golden-haired girl and together they go on an adventure into a land called Terabithia, where the trees walk like giants. I liked Narnia, then, as well as The Lord of the Rings and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain and Harry Potter and a bevy of suchlike tales, and I was intrigued by Terabithia because the trailer’s images reminded me of them.

And I clearly remember being disappointed when I learned about the book that the movie was based on, and about how Terabithia wasn’t, in fact, “real.” Terabithia was just a place imagined by the children. I remember being disappointed, and also, in a way, betrayed: what kind of children’s author would dress up their story as something it wasn’t? Who’d strangle the fantasy in its crib and then morbidly parade it around like an effigy? […]