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Cleveland Review of Books
@clereviewbooks.bsky.social
the cleveland of reviews of books
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"In fact, once he knows he has Mare and Bern completely under his spell, he sends them on errands. For a serial killer, he is incredibly lazy about the necessities of everyday life, like money and food."

from "Their Many Names" by Jess Richardson

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Their Many Names - Cleveland Review of Books
She did not know her future husband owned a gun, but he briefly served and so it makes a sudden kind of sense.
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"Romano’s memoir is an early example of feminist life writing, comparable to the work of not just of Ernaux, but also the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and the autobiography of Marguerite Duras."

Eliza Browning on Lalla Romano's "In Farthest Seas"

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Minima Mortalia: On Lalla Romano’s “In Farthest Seas” - Cleveland Review of Books
The impression is that Romano is attempting to stretch time in order to prolong her husband's life, summoning memories of his past selves as a form of resistance against death.
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November 21, 2025 at 12:50 AM
"In fact, once he knows he has Mare and Bern completely under his spell, he sends them on errands. For a serial killer, he is incredibly lazy about the necessities of everyday life, like money and food."

from "Their Many Names" by Jess Richardson

clereviewofbooks.com/their-many-n...
Their Many Names - Cleveland Review of Books
She did not know her future husband owned a gun, but he briefly served and so it makes a sudden kind of sense.
clereviewofbooks.com
November 19, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Cleveland Review of Books
community mausoleum is putting out some of the best stuff rn--I loved this book.
Temptation fragrant energy Floribunda in memory Floribunda remind me / Madame madame in memory of all America shrub flag line bangs wind

from "Deadheading" by Jon Conley

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from "Deadheading" - Cleveland Review of Books
Madame madame in memory of all America shrub flag line bangs wind
clereviewofbooks.com
November 17, 2025 at 2:27 PM
"What [New Romantics] are calling for is not a simple resurgence of feeling, a giving of ourselves over to every passion we have, but rather a conversion of desire."

John-Paul Heil on Joshua Wren, Sally Thomas, and "New Romanticism"

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New Romantics in the Thick Real: On Joshua Hren and Sally Thomas - Cleveland Review of Books
New Romanticism is attentive to those transcendent wants for things that will truly fulfill us regardless of time, place, or social circumstance.
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November 18, 2025 at 4:49 PM
CRB 3.2: Revolutionary poetics, the Paris Commune, containers as cultural memory, feminist unsexing of language, the ethics of digression, grief as technology, art in munitions bunkers. If you flip through it fast, the stars spin. Welcome to the zoetrope.
November 17, 2025 at 5:49 PM
“One of the ironies of his posthumous reputation is that, to be read and accepted by canonical scholarship, James had to be embraced by scholars whose views ran directly counter to his own.” — Peter Huhne on two new critical perspectives on Henry James both from
@NYRB_Imprints
November 14, 2025 at 7:38 PM
I. was 9 when I fell
from the window
for language.

from "Vision Sans Seraphim" by Jed Munson.

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from "Vision Sans Seraphim" - Cleveland Review of Books
I. was 9 when I fell from the window for language.
clereviewofbooks.com
November 12, 2025 at 10:47 PM
"The poets grapple with what it means to create a purpose-built archive and the ways in which this impulse counters the traditional principle of the archive."

Megan McKenzie on "Permanent Record"

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Read Backwards: on “Permanent Record” - Cleveland Review of Books
The human impulse towards self-documentation is everywhere once you start looking for it.
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November 6, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Cleveland Review of Books
In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.
Twelve Bullets, Four Appendices, and Six Exhibits: On Don DeLillo’s “Libra” - Cleveland Review of Books
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
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November 5, 2025 at 9:30 PM
"These plots I conceive easily
They describe action
As original as the sun’s constant production
The bells that ring across the estuary
Draw the hours in and together"

Three Poems by Hannah Piette

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Three Poems - Cleveland Review of Books
Forests moderate speech / By way of the soil.
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November 5, 2025 at 3:38 PM
"Randolph Healy deserves to get noticed. The Ireland-raised poet and math teacher—who will turn 70 next year—has been assembling thoughtful, counterintuitive poems, short and long, into small press volumes since the 1980s."

Stephanie Burt on Randolph Healy

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It’s Better to Stay Many-Minded: On Randolph Healy’s "The Electron-Ghost Casino" - Cleveland Review of Books
Some poets get noticed easily, early on. Their work speaks to the moment, or to the zeitgeist, or to a nation’s or a generation’s sense of itself.
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November 4, 2025 at 2:58 PM
"Canetti obsessively writing the same phrase, in slightly different permutations, decades apart; me, attempting again and again to capture my grandmother—where does that impulse come from, the need to record?"

Emma Heath on Elias Canetti and death

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Death Recorded: On Elias Canetti’s “The Book Against Death” - Cleveland Review of Books
When my grandmother died, I too had this impulse—to record everything she said, and everything said about her death. I would stop in the middle of the street in order to write down my mother’s updates...
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November 3, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Temptation fragrant energy Floribunda in memory Floribunda remind me / Madame madame in memory of all America shrub flag line bangs wind

from "Deadheading" by Jon Conley

clereviewofbooks.com/from-deadhea...
from "Deadheading" - Cleveland Review of Books
Madame madame in memory of all America shrub flag line bangs wind
clereviewofbooks.com
October 29, 2025 at 1:59 PM
"Sometimes when I think of Midwestern in terms of being proud that you’re from the Midwest, I think of breweries, and coffee shops, and things that are very branded in this way that then became described as Williamsburg."

Chris Molnar interviews Natasha Stagg

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Garage Rock and Grand Rapids: An Interview with Natasha Stagg - Cleveland Review of Books
They do not have a next stop. They just have to die now.
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October 28, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Give a sailor’s greeting to the contributors of CRB Vol. 3.2. This here list looks a little something like the mag's back cover. By subscribing, you'll get this issue in your mailbox, soon. Use the discount code THEBIRDS to get 30% off any level.
October 27, 2025 at 1:58 PM
"Kojève’s reflections on the conditions of politically meaningful action and philosophy speak to our current zeitgeist where history seems neither dead nor alive."

Alexander Aerts on Kojéve's "Kant"

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Less Chatter, More Action: on Alexandre Kojève’s "Kant" - Cleveland Review of Books
One has to reckon with a postmodern condition of meaninglessness and feeling of being too late to the party.
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October 26, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Cleveland Review of Books
This is great 🙏🏽
October 24, 2025 at 3:45 PM
“The Nobel Prize is fitting, if anything: Alfred Nobel established the prize out of guilt as a 'death merchant,' and now our greatest novelist of decay and destruction has been given the dynamite money.”

Evan Grillon on Krasznahorkai

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Tiny Apocalypses: On László Krasznahorkai's "Herscht 07769" - Cleveland Review of Books
His books have prophesied dooms big and small for forty years now, much to the annoyance of our century's chummy optimists and milquetoast novelists obsessed with their own private misery and campus p...
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October 23, 2025 at 11:05 PM
"My cat wasn’t lost but everyone in the neighborhood kept calling me. “I found your cat,” they said, and then they would describe my cat to me."

from "Hurricane Envy" by Sarah Jaffe (published by Rescue Press)

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from "Hurricane Envy" - Cleveland Review of Books
And my kids have food, whatever they want.
clereviewofbooks.com
October 22, 2025 at 2:26 PM
"Contemporary manosphere literature certainly paints a landscape of patriarchy in crisis, at war with itself about how it should wield its own power."

Leah Abrams, "Into the Manosphere—in Manuscripts"

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Into the Manosphere—in Manuscripts - Cleveland Review of Books
Contemporary manosphere literature certainly paints a landscape of patriarchy in crisis, at war with itself about how it should wield its own power.
clereviewofbooks.com
October 21, 2025 at 2:12 PM
3.2 is coming soon, and if you subscribe by Nov 7 you'll be among the first to receive it in the mail + one of the last to receive the (few) remaining copies of 3.1. Use the discount code THEBIRDS to get 30% off any level. I don't know. If you like print. Collect them all.
October 17, 2025 at 2:50 PM
"The book is an umbracle for gradations of in-between: secrecy, lies, faith, and fantasy."

On the occasion of the release of the unredacted paper history of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, Nicole Kaack revisits Don DeLillo’s Libra

clereviewofbooks.com/bullets-appe...
Twelve Bullets, Four Appendices, and Six Exhibits: On Don DeLillo’s “Libra” - Cleveland Review of Books
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
clereviewofbooks.com
October 16, 2025 at 3:38 PM
"Why is there a theater in the basement of a clinic? What is happening? A novel is like that, about something happening, which feels off, or false, to focus on that considering."

from "Sea, Poison," by our new fiction editor, Caren Beilin.

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from "Sea, Poison" - Cleveland Review of Books
He beamed like he was telling me he wrote for a living, like that exists.
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October 15, 2025 at 2:57 PM
"Morrison could push through a book about Black life and history, formally more of a collage than a narrative, to great success because the economic, political, and commercial stars aligned."

Adrianna Michell on "Toni at Random"

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When Chloe Met Toni: On Dana A. Williams’ “Toni at Random” - Cleveland Review of Books
It refashions some of the individualist precepts of the genre to craft a collective narrative of the mid to late century Black publishing community.
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October 11, 2025 at 3:09 PM
"a university is not a television station. a university is not a circle you can walk around. a university is not a telephone or a table lamp or a table. a university is just a plot device."

from "Groceries" by Nora Claire Miller @fonografeditions.bsky.social

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from "Groceries" - Cleveland Review of Books
a university is not a television station. a university is not a circle you can walk around.
clereviewofbooks.com
October 8, 2025 at 2:05 PM