REVIEWS, TRANSLATION, COLUMNS Guest User REVIEWS, TRANSLATION, COLUMNS Guest User

Review: Camellia Street by Mercè Rodoreda, Translated by David Rosenthal

When I first heard of Mercè Rodoreda, I was on a tour of an aerial bunker far beneath the streets of Barcelona, packed in tight with twenty strangers, sitting quietly in the dark and listening to the sounds of labored breathing. The bunker was located in the middle of Gracià, the neighborhood in which Rodoreda’s work is set, and I had signed up for the tour to better understand a crucial piece of Catalan history, one that Rodoreda takes as the starting point for her work — the realities of the Spanish Civil War, and its devastating, far-reaching fallout in Barcelona.

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What Makes a War Story: An Interview with Phil Klay

Phil Klay is the New York Times bestselling author of Redeployment, which among other accolades won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. A Marine Corps veteran, Klay writes extensively on issues ranging from religion to combat to national and foreign policy. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Men’s Journal, and more.

As a civilian war writer, I’ve been familiar with Phil Klay’s work for years, but have not had the opportunity to speak to him until this interview. Our conversation covers considerable ground, touching on everything from writing craft to national security to reading lists of contemporary war literature.

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Review: Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez

Photographs are often intimate artifacts, heirlooms, and a means by which our mortality is tracked and recalled. Many of our contemporary rituals around memory use photographs as a conjuring mechanism to reanimate the past. A timely hybrid-genre text, Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez interrogates the white gaze and how the curation of the archive is another palimpsestic layer of control and power.

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