Must I Go by Yiyun Li Lilia, an 81-year-old mother of five, grandmother of seventeen, and widow of three, is the anchor of Yiyun Li’s new novel “Must I Go.” Jaded and apathetic, Lilia is described first at the beginning of the novel in third-person narration; we later come to know her more personally through her annotations in the posthumous diary of Roland Bouley, an ex-lover. Her brief notes, assumed to be scribbled on the margins of the diary’s pages, recount the short affair they had when she was a teenager, which resulted in her pregnancy with his daughter, Lucy,…
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Tagged New Directions
Arcana, Alive: Anne Serre’s The Fool
The Fool and Other Moral Tales / Anne Serre, trans. by Mark Hutchinson / New Directions, 09/19 – $15 (Paperback) Repulsive, violent, confounding: that’s how I would best describe Anne Serre’s newly translated collection of short stories, The Fool. Yet Serre performs a wild alchemy within the tight confines of the three fabulous tales collected…
Sunday Staff Picks: Favorites of the Decade
In celebration of the approach of 2020, the Columbia Review staff members use this as an opportunity to look back over the books from the last decade. In alphabetical order by author, these are their selections: The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson (2018) Acerbic and vicious,…