Briefly Noted

The Crossing, by Richard Parker (Mariner). “American past did not statesman successful the Northeast. It began successful the Southwest,” Parker asserts, successful this sweeping past of El Paso, his location town. The account, which starts successful the sixteenth century, is 1 of some endless struggle and cross-cultural accommodation. “El Paso is wherever Native, Spanish, European, African, Jewish, and Arab cultures fought, bled, died,” helium writes, but it’s besides wherever they forged a “vibrantly diverse” nine that became a exemplary for the country. Although Parker was moved to constitute the publication aft a achromatic nationalist murdered twenty-three radical astatine an El Paso Walmart, successful 2019, helium strikes a hopeful note: “This isn’t conscionable wherever America began. If we’re lucky, it tin amusement America however to statesman again.”

Powers of Reading, by Peter Szendy, translated from the French by Olivia Custer (Zone). In this elliptical meditation connected the quality of reading, Szendy draws a transportation betwixt Phaedrus speechmaking aloud to Socrates, the speechmaking authorities of Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” and audiobooks. He argues that the solitary, soundless benignant of speechmaking that has go the norm is “an interiorization of the speechmaking aloud that prevailed” for centuries. “When I work silently,” helium writes, “I perceive to myself reading.” Much present is theoretical, but Szendy’s eventual intent is to constituent toward a caller “politics of reading,” 1 that volition empower the “readee,” oregon “the 1 for whom 1 reads,” amid the proliferation of integer devices and techniques that are “shaking up our acquisition arsenic readers.”

What We’re Reading

Discover notable caller fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.