Our eclectic gathering of noteworthy reviews this week spotlights Etna by Paul Yoon, Killing Spree by Jorie Graham, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple, Triage by Claudia Rankine, and The Palm House by Gwendoline Reilly.
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Etna
Paul Yoon’s third novel, Etna, steps into the expanding landscape of modern fiction that centers on an animal caught in the maelstrom of human conflict. The story follows a military dog named Etna who is seized and discarded as war rages on around him. Like Open Throat, Etna serves as a sharply crafted hypothesis not only about how a nonhuman observer might perceive danger and the world, but also about how those perceptions can be translated into narrative. While Etna steadies some of the stern moral judgments found in Open Throat by steering the plot toward empathy, the author’s critique of humanity remains piercing, emerging from a philosophy that accepts the messy burden of living, whether one travels on two legs or four. As with all weary, uprooted beings, Etna yearns for a sense of home, yet unlike many of the humans who govern his surroundings, he possesses far less agency to navigate his return. Still, there are compensations. Etna may lack the prerogatives of human sovereignty and the advantages of superior intellect, but he is freed from the hubristic delusions that fuel much of human-caused destruction. To a fellow dog he remarks, there is “no other place but here.”
Although compact, Etna assumes the grandeur of an epic. The narrative makes explicit allusions to Homer’s Odyssey: the titular creature seeks to regain the place of his birth after surviving a devastating war. The book even introduces a minor Greek figure named Achilles. Set in motion by base human impulses yet distinguished by moments of extraordinary insight, the animal tale is deeply intertwined with both ancient literary heritage and timeless concerns that recur in our world.
Etna invites readers to imagine a perception of reality liberated from human social conventions while still interrogating the elusive boundaries between human and nonhuman desires for belonging, closeness, and a sense of home. Yoon has long pursued these themes in his earlier works—most notably in Run Me to Earth and the prize-winning collection The Hive and the Honey—and his oeuvre consistently foregrounds the psychological and material wreckage of war. He understands that one of the most violent disruptions a living being can endure is abrupt estrangement from its surroundings. Yet in his hands, a character’s suffering never drowns out their capacity for tenderness. The author steadfastly preserves the enduring humanity of his displaced subject—even when that subject is not human.
This novel can be heartrending, strewn with fallen bodies, yet its violence never extinguishes its faith in creaturely communion. Grief and longing illuminate rather than obscure one’s desires and sense of self. Etna ponders a group of missionaries who cross his path and wonders what kind of beings they are, a question to which readers might well relate. In real life, dogs cannot explain the disasters we humans have wrought, nor can their loyalty absolve us, but their alert ears and wagging tails signal that they are waiting to know what comes next.
Killing Spree
In the latest collection, Graham’s notes tilt toward tragedy. Her verses move from lament to indictment as genocidal wars and the terrifying reach of modern technology join forces with climate upheaval in the world’s most troubled decades. What destabilizes Graham most is our collective inertia—what might be called a stubborn refusal to act. The opening poem suggests little changes at first, and we, too, observe a similar stagnation. The question “Where is everyone?” is posed, followed by a chilling stillness that names the quiet of mass death and the numbness or indifference of those who feel insulated from catastrophe. Even with her characteristic elegance and discipline, Killing Spree aims to rattle, to puncture the suffocating quiet with cries of sorrow and anger, to dismantle the inertia that hardens the human heart. The poem acknowledges that change may be elusive—poetry often cannot effect immediate results—but also insists that even a slight shift in awareness can be the sole contribution a poem can make.
Graham emerges as a poet who consistently challenges her own self-representation, retreating from explicit testimony even as she exposes herself. She does not indulge in the overblown, self-centered confession common to much contemporary lyric verse. The value of dramatizing lived consciousness only seems meaningful if that consciousness recognizes itself as operating within a shared historical frame, at once individual and deeply connected to others in dialogue with other minds or essences. The broken line and the stark dash serve as gestures toward the uncertain boundary between self and other, presence and absence, awareness and its erasure. Her language hovers on a threshold, learned and assured, yet carrying an underlying fragility that hints at a vortex of chaos and disintegration.
Graham’s poems grieve not from a passive despair but from a commitment to honor the lives lost and the lives that survive only by stubborn endurance. Killing Spree articulates what many readers, particularly within the American sphere, have yet to grasp: that being deemed ungrievable—treated as disposable by those who wield powerful weaponry—could soon describe those who currently enjoy privilege and security.
Crabapple
Crabapple is widely known for her visual artistry, distinguished by striking illustrations and lithographs rooted in the Occupy Wall Street era. She is also a tenacious reporter who has worked amid conflict zones. She points to a precedent in the history of progressive resistance—the Jewish communities and freedom fighters who resisted prejudice and tyranny in their homelands without resorting to nationalism or imperial ambitions abroad. Her message suggests that revolution can be tuned to a universal wavelength, accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund contends that Jewish history should not be read through a victimized lens or constrained by a narrative of hopelessness. This stance may appear surprising, but Crabapple proceeds from a refreshing premise: Jews have been agents of history, not merely casualties of its worst tendencies. The influence of anti-colonial sentiment across the twentieth century is depicted as a central thread in Jewish history, with exclusionary ideas about Jewish identity exposed as outdated long before a century had passed. In her account, Jewish ancestors serve as models of anti-imperial vigor, showing how acts of resistance could occur even under extreme conditions—patients in the Warsaw Ghetto who found ways to support Gandhi and his Indian independence movement. Telegrams praising Gandhi’s Quit India campaign traveled across borders, even as brutal imperial powers enforced martial law to maintain order during World War II. The point is not simply to recount solitary acts of bravery but to illuminate the enduring link between local struggles and global movements against oppression.
What Crabapple accomplishes with extraordinary clarity is to recast a pivotal but often misread segment of European Jewish life, injecting nuance and complexity into the conversation. Bundist Marek Edelman’s 1945 account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which did not reach Israeli audiences or Hebrew publication until 2001, is given a broader frame. The narrative that the insurrection was carried out largely by Zionist youth militias is challenged by her approach, which positions the Bundists—not as marginal players but as central to a broader project of anti-colonial solidarity. The book thus becomes a navigational tool for readers exploring the past and a rallying cry for opposing present-day oppressions.
Triage
What is Triage, exactly—a novel, a memoir, a work of criticism, or perhaps all of these at once? In medical practice, triage is the process of prioritizing care for those most gravely wounded. So what does this book prioritize? Beyond her stage writings, Triage marks Rankine’s first volume without a subtitle since Plot appeared in 2001. A brief preface cautions readers not to treat Triage as pure nonfiction: “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Unless it isn’t.” Does form still matter when approaching Rankine’s work? The sense in which the author hints at improvisation—“I’ll show you what it is, and you can decide later”—is central to how we experience the text.
Like Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Citizen: An American Lyric, and Just Us: An American Conversation, Triage is lively, referential, and intellectually dynamic. The book credits an array of theoretical, philosophical, and cinematic sources—Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, Omar El Akkad’s forthcoming One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, and John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project, among others—adding ballast to its argumentative construction. Yet Rankine’s grip on the text remains firmly with the narrator, whose recollections and, at times, hazy readings of political philosophy carry the weight of the argument. As the elder characters attempt to renew their waning connections, the narrator reveals that she is Black and the theorist hails from Ramallah, a disclosure that reframes the narrative’s frame of reference.
This recognition—anagnorisis in the Socratic sense—reconfigures the reader’s approach to the work. Triage invites a re-cognition: Antigone becomes a contemporary figure, the borders between theory and practice blur, and Rankine’s latest experiment widens the scope of her recent projects. While the ending brushes against abstraction, the work insists on confronting the failures that have allowed disasters in Gaza to be overlooked, with the personal, ethical, and human costs laid bare.
The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley, a remarkably gifted British novelist now in her late forties, commands esteem for a body of work that has grown increasingly precise and piercing. Her novels, though compact in form, carry a forceful, often ruthless intelligence that has earned her devoted readers—particularly among younger women—though the works themselves rarely indulge in sentimentality. The current climate—where fandom thrives in torrents of social media and algorithm-driven feeds—amplifies a culture in which devoted readers may risk replacing their own discernment with adoration. Riley’s narrators, intelligent and exacting, tend to resist the kind of swooning gaze that a contemporary fan might offer, preferring a gaze that sifts and scrutinizes. The result is a body of work that shuns easy emotional lift even as it delivers sharp, unflinching revelations about feeling and motive. A Riley novel asks readers to meet a form of aesthetic rigor with a cool, almost clinical, attention to the truth of experience.
Riley’s fiction often explores the ties that bind family members and the fraught terrain of intimate relationships, yet the most striking aspect of her work is how rarely it treats successful, sustaining love as a given. The realm of purely mutual, nourishing partnership remains conspicuously scarce, a hallmark of a distinctly anti-romantic British literary lineage—one that shares roots with Philip Larkin’s stark candor, with Amis’s father-and-son dynamics, and with Muriel Spark’s sly, sometimes cruel tonal turns. Across Riley’s novels, recurring archetypes appear in varied forms: the unreliable, imperfect male musician, a domineering paternal figure whose death arrives too soon, and a meek mother shepherding fragile, unstable partners. Yet this recurring cast does not feel repetitive; rather, it becomes a way of mapping a landscape where repetition can reveal deeper truths about resilience, compromise, and the limits of sentiment.
With The Palm House, Riley appears to introduce a fresh kind of protagonist, a new cadence of voice that challenges expectations and invites a more nuanced reading of her moral universe. I smiled while reading a New York Times profile in which Riley quips about watching Hamnet—an aside that felt at once caustic and revealing: she suggests that the film, despite its acclaim, risks sentimentality. The remark is sharp, but it also reveals a nuanced stance: even celebrated works can include missteps, while genuine artistry persists beyond such misfires. It is a reminder that embracing beauty and fidelity to craft does not require surrendering one’s critical faculties. Is there a price to pay for choosing taste over trend? Riley’s recent novel answers with a quiet, reasoned assertion: valuing the subtleties of form and truth can coexist with a willingness to acknowledge the occasional misstep, and doing so may help a reader discover the beauty that endures in, for instance, the delicate interplay of house, memory, and the people who inhabit them.
