Kaelie Giffel

Tr. from the Italian by Julia Nelsen [Transit Books; 2026] As I watch the crumbling of US politics and the increasingly vitriolic and revanchist gender politics that are a unique part of class warfare here, I am reminded of fascist Italy: the creepy gaze of an ineffective head of state (Mussolini, obviously) and his regime’s expectations of women. War, and its constitutive masculinism, threatens everyone’s dreams, chances, and sense of selves.

Tr. from the Japanese by Polly Barton [Europa Editions; 2025] I’ve become a cynical reader, one who knows what’s gonna happen in a book, who is going to narrate it (and why), and which literary moves will be made. This injury is partially from being a reviewer and partially from surviving a doctorate. Grumpily, I assumed many things about Aoko Matsuda’s The Woman Dies, even as I was excited for a new Polly Barton translation.

[Other Press; 2025] Tr. from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood In The Politics of Experience, his influential critique of alienation, R.D. Laing writes that we must “begin by admitting and even accepting our violence rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it and therewith we have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.” Alienation is a fundamental split between people and also within ourselves, in which our individual self vanishes under the demands...