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Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography by Stanley Plumly
Keats's Afterlife
A review by Christopher Ricks
Rome, November 30, 1820. John Keats, who at the age of twenty-five has less than three months to live, is writing to his friend Charles Brown in England: I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been -- but it appears to me -- however, I will not speak of that subject. The word that rotates, "but," is rounded upon, in its turn, by the word "however." Keats, with a courage that is something better than unflinching (for the unflinching may be not so much courageous as...
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A review by Rebecca Donner
Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries -- relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert's remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy's method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. "I was afraid I would...
Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang by Ziyang Zhao
China's Dictators at Work: The Secret Story
A review by Jonathan Mirsky
Prisoner of the State is the secretly recorded memoir of Zhao Ziyang, once holder of China's two highest Party and state positions and the architect of the economic reforms that have brought the country to the edge of great-power status. The book has had much attention in the West. Inside China, despite official attempts to denigrate and block any news of it on the Internet, it is already having a powerful effect. This effect will increase as Chinese tourists from the mainland buy the Chinese edition of the book in Hong Kong. Twenty years ago, just before the Tiananmen killings on June 3...
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Trouble by Kate Christensen
Social Satire
A review by Katherine Dunn
[Editor's note: We'd like to welcome the Oregonian as our new Review-a-Day partner. Look for a new Oregonian review every Thursday.] The term "Chick Lit" gives me hives. It reeks of patronizing scorn, but what's worse, a lot of the stuff that wears this label is mush-brained glop and deserves the scorn. I'm a tad exercised on this subject for the moment, because Kate Christensen's sleek new novel Trouble could easily, if mistakenly, be tarred with the "Chick Lit" brush. One reviewer described Trouble as "a coming-of-middle-age novel that explores the sexual lives of three women in...
Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto
Puttin' on the Glitz
A review by Natasha Wimmer
Though not advertised as such in the United States, Jose Manuel Prieto's Rex is actually the third volume in a trilogy that begins with the as-yet-untranslated Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia) and also includes the acclaimed Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire (Prieto's first novel published in English, in 2000). Prieto, who was born in Cuba in 1962 and spent twelve years in Russia, where he studied engineering, is a writer who ascribes great seriousness to ideas, as befits someone who grew up in a system steeped in ideology. Among many other things,...
Min' Okubo: Following Her Own Road by Greg Robinson
Discovering the Citizen
A review by Jessica Knight
It's hard not to like Mine Okubo as we come to know her through this first book-length study of her life and work: feisty, eccentric, and deeply committed to her art. A slim, beautifully produced volume, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road is both a tribute to the artist, who died in 2001, and an important step in remedying the dearth of scholarship on her work. The paucity of Okubo criticism may in part be a situation of her own making: best known for her landmark graphic memoir Citizen 13660, which documents her experience as a prisoner in the internment camps for Japanese Americans during...
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