Books published by NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"'My poems are flecks of salt clinging ambivalently to a horse's back,' Wang Yin writes. Selected Poems, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, is the first comprehensive collection of this important Chinese poet's work to appear in English. Readers can follow the full arc of the poet's career, from the early, surrealist and Deep Image-influenced work of the 1980s, when he made his debut as a post-Misty poet, through the turn toward the rawer, more immediate poetry of the nineties, and on to the existential and ineffable weavings of his more recent work. Wang Yin's sensibility is both cosmopolitan and lyrical, and his poetry has a subtlety and beauty that contrasts with the often physically painful imagery with which he depicts psychological reality, a reality expressed as various states of mind struggling against the suppression of memory. Shanghai winters, a winter in Katowice, a summer day with ghosts, blue shadows, petals in the darkness, an 'empty lane lit up by moonlight'--the poems of this extraordinary volume illuminate the inner life as a singular encounter between physical and spiritual realms"

""'There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.' Thus spake Tyrion in the final episode of Game of Thrones, claiming the throne for Bran the Broken. Many viewers liked neither the choice of king nor its rationale. But the claim that story brings you to world dominance seems by now so banal that it's common wisdom. Narrative seems to have become accepted as the one and only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs." So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's reckoning with today's flourishing cult of story. Forty years after Brooks published his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his own important contribution to what came to be known as the "narrative turn" in contemporary criticism and philosophy, he returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from Gone Girl to legal argument, to the power storytellers exercise over their audiences, to what it means for readers and listeners to project themselves imaginatively into fictional characters, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive. Precisely because story does command our attention so, we must be skeptical of it and cultivate ways of thinking about our world and ourselves that run counter to our penchant for a good story"--