david

Hunter-gatherers rarely feel like they are working. Everything is meningful and everything is challenging. Is hunting work? Is fishing work? People sell real estate so they can hunt and fish. Who would hunt and fish so they could sell real estate?

Rio Shimamoto’s First Love , an overdue English-language debut by an important Japanese author translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a portrait of patriarchy as a series of glassy, threatening surfaces. It turns a procedural setup—Yuki, a psychologist, investigates the case of a woman who stabbed her father to death, seemingly without motive—into a... See more

Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened

I’m gonna give my favorite-novel-of-the-year award to Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California , about a woman who assumes her brother’s identity shortly after his death. It’s fun, beautiful, slim, weird. And it’s about grief. Blackburn’s approach to space-time in her short fiction is awesome; her novel has vivid characterizations—of both... See more