Cleveland Review of Books

1 week ago | clereviewofbooks.com | Michael Watkins

Michael WatkinsMichael Watkins is a poet from Pennsylvania. He lives in West Philadelphia. Under the pseudonym Ricky Salmonhunter, he has published two chapbooks: Underbellies of the Ancient Cube Trick (Spiral Editions, 2023) and PASTORALLLL (2022).

1 month ago | clereviewofbooks.com | Robert Rubsam

Down in the courtyard beneath the blooming ginko, Nelly Blum handed us each an invitation. The card was heavy in my hand, and in old-style type it announced that on the afternoon of June 23rd, 1913, she would host a great Midsummer gathering at her estate on a lake to the west of Berlin. This party was the latest iteration of a long family tradition.

2 months ago | clereviewofbooks.com | Stephanie Burt

I am not qualified to review Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry. It’s not clear to me that anyone is, given Ruby’s stated goals: his book-length poem attempts to explain the history of poetry and poetics, “retracing the steps we’ve taken to get here” from “the palaces of late Bronze Age kings” to our current all-too-online moment, focusing first on classical antiquity, then on the European Middle Ages, then on French and English.

2 months ago | clereviewofbooks.com | Jason Rogers

In his debut novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq wrote that “the novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness.” And yet, the 1994 bildungsroman—which featured an unnamed, vividly sullen, and suicidal narrator—inspired an entire youth subculture in France now known as “depressionism.” With that despondent style as a mold, Houellebecq, now 68, has since written numerous, always male, protagonists who occupy uninspiring jobs and navigate life through detached reflections...

Jan 23, 2025 | clereviewofbooks.com | Colm McKenna

Despite his reputation as a raro and a varied oeuvre encompassing meta-fiction, short stories, detective novels, crosswords, comics and more, Mario Levrero may cut an oddly unified figure to his anglophone audience. His two novels translated into English, Empty Words (2019) and The Luminous Novel (2021), share common ground. In the former, a novelist begins a course of graphological self-therapy—handwriting exercises that he believes will also improve his general character.