BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ by Alfred Döblin translated by Michael Hofmann NYRB Classics, 458 pages reviewed by Tyson Duffy Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A thought experiment: imagine that back during the peak prosperity years of the Obama Administration, with optimism at a high and unemployment dropping, that the good Dr. Oliver Sacks had unexpectedly published a despairing novel featuring a one-armed murdering pimp with white-supremacist leanings named Frank Beaverbrains. This dull petty criminal wanders Manhattan—or some gentrifying urban center of high culture and national pride—selling tie stands and alt-right newsletters, roughing up prostitutes, shooting up bars, and volunteering for a ...

ALL FOR NOTHING by Walter Kempowski translated by Anthea Bell NYRB Classics, 368 pages reviewed by Tyson Duffy Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Every self-professed American optimist should read the oeuvre of Walter Kempowski—not that they ever will. The chronicler of brutality was never given a fair shake even by his fellow Germans, and despite strong book sales, by literary award committees. Kempowski had plenty of reasons to be angry—angry at his Nazi father whom he betrayed, at what the agonized Sebastian Haffner once called the “moral inadequacy of the German character,” at the literary world for snubbing him, ...

WAYWARD HEROES by Halldór Laxness translated by Philip Roughton Archipelago Books, 466 pages reviewed by Tyson Duffy The Slighted, the Neglected, the Sufferers of Injustice, and Sheep Certain great writers fade from the American memory like condensation from a windowpane. The Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness—he was once all the rage here—is one. He was considered something of an upstart, a genius, a social novelist, a fellow traveler of Upton Sinclair and Bertolt Brecht, and he often journeyed between Europe and America. A Marxist-Stalinist who was very critical of America, he was once important enough to attract the personal ire of ...

WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR by Patrick Dacey Henry Holt & Co. (hardcover edition) Picador Trade Paperback, 206 pages Patrick Dacey's story "Ballad", which appears in the collection, was published in Cleaver's Issue No. 6.  reviewed by Tyson Duffy “The priest departs,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1871, “the divine literatus comes.” It’s something of an unspoken article of faith in American thought that without some guiding central dogma—whether literature, Christianity, democracy, ideology, “infopreneurship”—the individual is in danger of slumping forward like a marionette and falling uselessly to the floor. In the nineteenth century, Whitman ushered Protestantism out ...