John Casey

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that “the life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.” He was neither the first nor the last person to note the stubborn intimacy between the tragic and the…

Yiming Ma’s debut joins a long tradition of speculative novels that craft an alternative history for the sake of illuminating the present moment. These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is set in a world where a single global superpower, the Qin Empire, has achieved total dominance. Details about the geopolitical situation within or beyond its borders are few and far…

Where should we place our faith in times of upheaval? Some might suggest family, God, money, government, literature, or television. Others might say the future, history, nature, ourselves alone, or nowhere at all. How, though, would we know that such faith was well placed? These grand questions and tentative answers reverberate across Rob Benvie’s ambitious and incantatory fourth…