The Short, Troubled Lives of Two Russian Geniuses
The reason for being of the book, and one of its dramatic thrills, is that these two friends not only did not fall to the wayside but have endured. They also both pointed the way to the future.
book reviews by John Griswold
“Are the Important Things Something Else Entirely?”
Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin, is an award-winning German novelist, short story writer, playwright, and opera director. Not a Novel is her first full-sized nonfiction collection, translated in 2020 by Kurt Beals, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.
The Rise and Fall of St. Louis and The Broken Heart of America
Because it is about our nation as much as it is about one city, and because Johnson frames it as “the two-hundred-year history of removal, racism, and resistance that flowed through the two minutes of confrontation on August 9, 2014”—the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, which touched off Black Lives Matter—the book is for all of us and for now.