MAY WE FEED THE KING, Booker-shortlisted poet's novel

MAY WE FEED THE KING
REBECCA PERRY
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending November 3, 2026

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Winner will be announced on 9 November.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.

He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.

May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A poet penning a literary novel about an unnamed museum curator grieving an unstated loss while she is engaged in a project that reimagines the physical world of an unnamed surprise king in his unnamed palace on its 750th anniversary of foundation and use.

I have been deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings for the past twenty-two years. When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie, and for a very good reason. When you come upon a room, cordoned off with red rope, beyond which you see an open book on a desk, a chunk of bread picked hollow, and a quill in an ink pot that is empty of ink, I am telling you something about the person who lives in that room. The ink may be purple, and even though no one can see it in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand people will sense it. Ultimately, I want my work to communicate with everyone, but it is those people I really hold in my mind.

Sounds drearily precious, like a poem, like all the pit-sniffing Literary Novels we're subextually told us mouth-breathers are too dullwitted to Appreciate, no?

No. And no one is more surprised than me. I was interested in reading the story because, well, Booker snobbery is the honest way to say it. (I'm still salty that US Anglophone authors are now eligible for what was explicitly a Commonwealth storytelling prize...twelve years and not over it yet.) As the story unfolds in past and present, the real reason I kept going and going hit me...I'm a sucker for the hyperfixated, the deep-focusing narrow-vision-having wonks of History. It's endlessly interesting to me that someone could get this interested in creating an immersive experience for a modern audience of small size centering the medieval world of a minor, forgotten royal. Just to conceive of it is interesting abd then to sell the idea, to research the minutiae, to think through the problems inherent in the process...yep, I'm in!

Of course what's driving our curator to the bizarre lengths has to be very, very painful, very overwhelming to demand this depth of avoidance; it's a good decision for Author Perry to leave it imprecise, unfocused because specificity ruins relatability. I've been that deep in grief so I suppose there's more than a little fellow feeling driving my interest. I get in a visceral way the desire to lose one's hurting self in an all-absorbing, unrelated subject that can't trigger hurting memories or aching similarities that will fuel the downward spiral: "There’s something that can happen when I am embarking on a project on the scale of the work at the palace, and so heavily focused on food scenes: my appetite sours, and real food becomes some-thing of a threat. I can’t be sure if it is becoming more or less real, too much itself, too vivid, or something altogether different. Whatever, it makes me not want to eat."

Probably the short chapters Author Perry alternates between present and past are going to annoy some readers enough to cause comment from them. I'd like to offer an alternative to the annoyed noises by saying that mosaics are made of tesserae that look like nothing while the artist is assembling them to a pattern they alone see entire. But the pieces that look so unlikely, so unimportant, are integral to a whole we need patience to experience as intended: "One evening on the way home from the palace—after a full day in the shadow of the archives, where we had sat, the archivist and I, my left biceps pressed against their right, making a double-width human—I stopped in a local bar for a glass of wine.

These are things that I had forgotten how to do, that I had forgotten were possible."

It can enrich the experience of seeing the whole very much to recall the process of being present as it's made. This poetically rich story, a concentrated, allusive work of reckoning with a life's boundaries and endings is the reward a reader will remember and treasure long after the book itself retires to its shelf-bound afterlife.

THE SLOW ELEPHANTS OF MILAN, Argentinian strangeness in fragments you make into a mosaic

THE SLOW ELEPHANTS OF MILAN
ÁNGEL BONOMINI (tr. Jordan Landsman)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Enigmatic fictions from a lost master of Argentine literature.

A thick fog rolls into Milan as a man watches in astonishment while a procession of elephants crosses the street. A couple wandering through a forest is pointed toward a mysterious city from which they may never return. Two prisoners share a cell in the aftermath of a battle—one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy.

The Slow Elephants of Milan expands Ángel Bonomini’s exploration of the interstitial realms between dream and reality. Originally published in 1978, these surreal and enigmatic fictions are among Bonomini’s finest and most autobiographical, threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine.

With delicate precision, The Slow Elephants of Milan deconstructs the scaffolding of our perceptions to reveal what lies beneath: a metaphysical mirror-world that shimmers with haunting familiarity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I didn't find the individual stories...twelve in all...particularly compelling as stories. Author Bonomini is no Hemingway, no transcendent master of the short-story form. He was an excellent craftsman who took great care to use the short-story form as a means to convey moods, insights, gestalts of incident building life.

The title story is a good example of this. A man sees a truly arresting sight: two elephants being led through the streets of Milan. Author Bonomini reflects on this without sentimentality, without concern for the elephant-ness of their existence; the narrator sees them when he is mid-reflection on the deep, deepening sadness of his life and soul; he sees these elephants multiple times walking almost unremarked through Milan's busy streets and is surprised afresh at how this sight he's captivated by is of little to no apparent interest to others.

Okay. That's the kind of trip we're going on, then, the odd but not impossible thing that carries Meaning and delves into Ideas. I wasn't eager for more but it's under 160pp, so what the hell. "Diary of My Portraits" was so memorable it lifted my impression of the collection above "nice work, not amazing but pleasantly engaging." In this story, the narrator sees a bird come into his apartment, thinks it is the same bird; but each time the bird is a different color. This happens in parallel to the narrator's partner painting his portrait, carefully and attentively creating an image of his face with laborious precision; then, dissatisfied with the likeness she has made, she destroys the portrait and begins afresh the process of capturing the narrator's appearance, his face, the image he shows to the world. Only to destroy it again. It is a lovely, poignant moment realizing that the artist's name...Moira...is a very interestingly resonant from its Greek bits to its resemblance to the Spanish verb form "mira"— "Look!"

To be the subject of this process, to have your likeness never completed, never satisfactory...to her, to the image's creator, no participation from you as the subject...was my key to finding these stories more in sum than they are as pieces. Gestalt formed yet? Everything in this collection of stories examines the image of a thing, the viewable parts changing but never fitting a single view, not even for a single viewer.

Instability and surveillance...seeing from on high...meet uneasily, irreconcilable in their differences of kind and sort of result. Nothing seen from the outside *is* the thing, no matter how much you want to call an elephant walking down a busy Italian street it is not.

It is itself.

Interesting ideas coming from perfectly fine stories will not be to everyone's taste, but I found the read much more than the sum of its parts.

WE WERE FORBIDDEN, feminist author at her tendentious best

WE WERE FORBIDDEN
JACQUELINE HARPMAN (tr. Roz Schwartz)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 9, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human defiance.

Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths.

As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe—her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportionate.

Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.

In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One of the most enduring stories in Western Anglophone culture is the princess in the tower, locked away and in the absolute control of A Man/A System/An Enemy, and how she must connive to survive with whatever degree of success the cruel, cruel storyteller allows her. Now firmly grounded in the reality of being female over the millennia, along comes Author Harpman with Translator Schwartz as amanuensis, extrapolating this cultural juggernaut to include all those trapped in subservience and obedience to high-control systems.

In "The Outcast" Author Harpman uses the most familiar iteration of the story. A teenaged girl is in the intertwining coils of adolescence and sexual maturation and cultural demands for conformity. It's harrowing to see Author Harpman's keen observations of fascism turned loose on one so hugely vulnerable and malleable...it is a shorter and refocused version of the juggernaut I Who Have Never Known Men and should appeal to those seeking more of that story only dressed in a shorter, more contemporaneous skirt.

Moving into times and ties more concrete, "The Broom Closet" is a woman's struggle to find her footing in 1920s Belgium. The demands of domesticity on women are different from those made on men even now; in the deeply conservative culture of postwar Belgium, where the battles that killed millions were barely over let alone their damage repaired, they were starkly different. As one adds the inexorable advance of marriage's compromises conflicting with the absolute tyranny of the need to create stories, the trap of cultural expectations springs shut. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own's observations made specific and played out with the intensity of "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Expanding the story logic to those enmeshed in the military of an apocalyptic future, "The Ardennes Forest" is the most immediately reminiscent in its setting to I Who Have Never Known Men while expanding scope beyond one woman's life. A group of conscripts are mapping and scouting the terrain for what they imagine, not unreasonably, to be a future battlefield. That future never comes. They continue the work they've been assigned.

Endlessly.

As the story goes into nothing deeply, it became obvious to me this is Author Harpman meditating on the tedious tasks of daily life performed under nebulous, ominous duress. There's a weirdly onanistic edge to the submission of these soldiers to their assigned task even as they begin to question what it is they're doing as nothing ever changes as a result of its self-similar patterns.

Three stories of people in a system of depersonalizing cruelty, and how that strips an individual of any sense of agency; numbing the essential "You"ness of you into submissive obedience. I'm not a bit sure it will make new Harpman fans. For one thing, there are limits to the efficacy of compactness in the involving process of storytelling. I think these three stories are on the shortest end of that effort, possibly too short for anyone not already familiar with Author Harpman's thematic hobbyhorses to fully invest in them.

Existing fans are in for a treat.

PANDORA, starting to see PlagueReads to explain our trauma to us

PANDORA
ANA PAULA PACHECO (tr. Julia Sanches)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Confined to her apartment, a professor falls into an unlikely romance—with a pangolin.

Ana, a literature professor, plans her remote classes while confined to her apartment during lockdown. Her lover, Alice, has died of Covid. In her place are a series of animals that demand Ana’s care and attention: an overbearing pangolin, a swarm of insects, a giant bat.

Amid changes in medication and fraught faculty meetings, Ana’s grip on reality loosens. She begins to devise a syllabus on the financialization of art and life, posing questions about labor and intimacy she will use her own body to answer. Her apartment fills with creatures, her teaching slides into absurd allegory, and her sense of what is real, permissible, or politically legible fractures.

Equal parts tender and grotesque, Pandora is a hallucinatory portrait of a mind and a world in collapse, a razor-sharp meditation on desire, delusion, and the absurd endurance of the human.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lockdown.

Shuddering yet? Five and a half years on, lots of people seem to have tossed the memory of COVID's terrifying early days down the oubliette in their brains' castle wall. This weird, weird little story reminds us of how very Kafkaeque the first six months of the plague were. Alice, Ana's other half, was lockdown-trapped away from her and Ana assumes she's dead. At least, that's how I read it...nothing so pedestrian as clear explanations are on offer here.

As lockdown wears on, Ana relies ever more on skype calls with her therapist, "White Beard", who does the medication route to help Ana get through her...unorthodox..life as she reports it to him/us. As Alice and Ana had been working on setting up a lesbian live-porn site before COVID hit, some parts of Ana's São Paulo academic's life were cast away in the now-solitary apartment, a virtual seminar on money, depression, the legal system sodomizing...wait that's not in the seminar...nor is a pangolin, and a very important role he will play. Bats, insects, critters are all memorably present, reminding us how very confusing it was in those early days trying to figure out how the heck this virus blazed through the world. Again in Kafkaesque terms, these are the main culprits of the mental map then prevailing...and in Ana's isolated, grieving, frightened mind they take on deeply disturbing sexual roles in her life as reported to "White Beard" and thus to us.

Her mind fragmenting, as we're seeing it happen, there arrives more medication from "White Beard"...that sends Ana further into psychotic break territory as she's transformed into an eagle.

I'm not making you understand how deeply relatable this story's most peculiar excesses are. I'm afraid I don't know how to. I was nodding along as Ana got it on with the pangolin, because I could *feel* her desperation as reality utterly, irrevocably altered, ripped her sense of herself into ragged shreds. Why shouldn't she have torrid sex with a pangolin? Alice is no longer with us...gotta get it somewhere....

There is nothing easy or non-confrontational about this read. It is meant to put the reader into a time, a place, a person's mind, that cracks under immense pressure. In so many ways, reading this short novel was catharsis for me, was a reminder that the times can create the break in a normal-presenting person without any unexpected or unsuspected inner flaws, faults, broken spots.

There but for the grace of the goddesses goes any one of us. I'd give it a full fifth star bit for les jeux avec les animaux. Disturbed me; it was the point to do that, but....

AT NIGHT HE LIFTS WEIGHTS: STORIES, bestselling collection translated from Korean by award-winning Janet Hong

AT NIGHT HE LIFTS WEIGHTS: STORIES
KANG YOUNG-SOOK (tr. Janet Hong)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.50 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A disquieting vision of ecological dystopia in a collection by a major Korean writer.

An artist is plagued by desire for her mysterious double as disease spreads through an uncanny suburban landscape. An elderly woman suspects the old man who lifts weights in her neighborhood playground of being responsible for a spate of murders. While elsewhere, a woman who believes she’s been exposed to radioactive radiation inherits a warehouse where those fleeing the city can store their possessions.

Beneath the calm surface of the stories collected here, Kang Young-sook offers a disquieting vision of a society grappling with ecological catastrophe and unplaceable forms of loss.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's not hard to see how this one stayed a bestseller in Korea, a country where they ousted their wannabe-dictator sitting president, yet failed to get much traction here, where the hoi polloi wished a stupid old man with a loud, grating voice and a Nixonesque "enemies list" into office. This kind of behavior used to shock us, like it did the South Koreans; when did that stop?

Nonetheless, the stories are individually crafted to keep one reading. I found it was easy to put the collection down between stories, but was always glad to pick it back up so I could reimmerse myself in a world worse than mine.

For now, anyway.

By long-established custom, we're going into the whole collection via the Bryce Method. Bless his cotton socks, this method of escaping the dead hand of shoulda-gotta on my creative juices is right up there with 'Nathan Burgoine's three-sentence review, and Nancy Pearl's Rule of Fifty.

From Mullae unsettles and disorients us, along with our psychologically fragile narrator, as the natural world undergoes a series of unexplored, barely explained disasters. Blood is the recurring visual...blood on the ground, blood on the newspapers set out to protect the floor of an apartment the narrator and her husband move into, blood permeating the air as countless pig corpses are dumped at his unspecified, but clearly horrible, workplace as the narrator peers down at it from a mound of earth that might be more pig carcasses. Women accost the narrator outside her building, forcing pamphlets on her urging resistance...to what? why? is this related to the unfolding disaster her husband begs her to remain indoors to escape? Unexplained. To say this story made me uneasy is to observe that the sun is a small, round spot in the sky. After the pandemic that killed so many people in my building, being trapped indoors while awful things happened and happened and happened...yeah, this one's sharp indeed. 4 stars

At Night He Lifts Weights gives us an elderly lady without family or purpose, living in an industrially destroyed environment, who suspects an elderly man of committing a series of horrible murders across the city. It's brutally honest about how lonely and useless people become in old age, though this silly, fluttering soul was always useless; the elderly man she suspects of crimes is, by contrast, vital, vigorous, and—ready for this?—lifts weights to stay in shape! Weird, right?

It must Mean Something, unlike the environmentally destroyed, stinking lake, the chronically backed-up toilet in her apartment (though this is handy because the plumber, a stripling of forty, is good to look at), or any of her other real problems. Like the other story I just read, it doesn't really end per se, it just has a natural place to stop. Resolution there is none. 4 stars

Radio and River Korean war survivor Oh emigrates to the US, a bleak now-ish California most likely, with a family he doesn't care about who heartily return his indifference. He starts work in some factory or another and makes a Korean friend, Kim. His inner silence is only broken with Kim, but like so many silent-cored people he surrounds himself with noise...dance music, hip hop: "Every time he heard this kind of shrieking, he felt like his corners had been filed down, so much so that he'd become a smooth lump of metal."

When a huge flood ravages the town, Oh loses his friend Kim. It snaps his last tenuous bond to his life. The road trip (and results of same) he goes on are...Lynchian, Twin Peaksy. 4*

Death Road features a suicidal woman whose childhood best buddy...a boy, against even mire powerful norms than in the US...all unknowingly and with opposite intent tells her about a Bolivian Andean road that she thinks will do nicely. That's not somewhere she can just...go, from Seoul anyway, so next up is Seoul's "Death Highway" as it's become called, an expressway interconnecting bridges, neighborhoods, etc etc. Unable to do the deed, flatten her foot on the accelerator and cause lethal havoc, she calls people from the car picking fights to work up the resolve, ending with her childhood bestie.

What a selfish and narcissistic person. Her inner and outer personas are not in harmony, which made this an effective rumination on the immense cost of misogyny, and the powerful rage of entrapped women...but nothing changes in the story (definitely the point) so it feels weak, weakening, draining without refilling. 4* for accurate reflection of womens' reality, but I never wanna read it again

Disaster Area Tour Bus follows a young Korean woman as she tours post-Katrina New Orleans. The tour bus driver's Black, and speaks in a really racist kind of dialect-Southern speech...author or translator or, most probably, both has never been to New Orleans...and, while I approve the anticapitalist disaster tourism messaging, and appreciate seeing how we look to outsiders, I couldn't get past the itchy icky sense that even your friends get it wrong sometimes. 3*

Greenland follows the life trajectory of ordinary people, no better or worse than they need to be, as they stagger unwittingly through traps, honey- and tiger-, as capitalism has its brutal way with them. Greed and selfishness and narcissism all play a role in the unraveling and redistribution of burdens...onto the women...and benefits...onto the men. Indexed to the modern history of Korea as it developed into a finance economy from a manufacturing one, the constant is that it's always a woman's thankless, unthanked job to do the work and clean up the messes. 4*

City of Anxiety is just that: full-on anxiety attacks, one after another, close third-person PoV that relentlessly charts a man's disintegration when his ex-wife disappears.

Searching for her entails a long litany of place names that mean nothing to me, innocent of all but the broadest sweeps of Korean geographical reality; it does not stop me from my apprehensive apprehension of this nameless man's unending fearful descent into a self-curated hellscape of obsessive regret. Nothing breaks him out of his narrow, bony, confining morass of unproductive, blindingly painful need.

Untrustworthy PoV, methinks, I reflected as his self-absorption drags him around without surcease. Was he the one who left the ex-wife? Did she, suffocating in his mire of inabilities, just...run? Did he kill her in a fit of emotional insanity as she tried to? It is a supremely evocative piece of writing. 4.5*

Pripyat Storage is named for the city nearest Chernobyl, of the 1986 nuclear disaster. A business the young woman narrator, turned thirty as 2006 marks her assuming of ownership and control from her newly-widowed mother, soon becomes engrossed in the minutiae of owning and running a business. It leaves her less time for obsessing over how her Chernobyl-blighted generation fails and fails and fails.

As her mother retreats into well-outfitted trips to distant mountains, she tries to reshape the storage business. As much as the indifference of her mother to the fate of the storage business annoys her, it also frees her to carve a new way to shed the unwanted garbage her father had piled up. It makes room for new people to fill this extra space, sparklingly clean from her mop and bucket, with the things they need to keep but can't bear to see in their faces.

Generational trauma making its way through the stages of grief. Deeply, sadly relatable. 4.5*

Processions proceeds from the knocking together of two empty vessels, a man and a woman who possess nothing, take nothing, give nothing, and thus find themselves attracted to the other's vacuum.

Quotidian things occur in the time they decide they will spend together; none important, none memorable, and since neither of them are those things, it is fitting they occur this way. No revelation, no great awareness shift, just two lonelinesses touching then parting. 3.5*
***

As a gestalt, this collection is less than the sum of its parts; as you'd expect from someone who has published four novels and five other collections before this one, nothing is wrong on a craft level nor is the translation somehow lacking in that hard-to-pin-down way. I'm just not full of anything now it's over. It's just...over. No fourth star for you, book.

IMMATERIAL (Undelivered Lectures series), offering a different take on what there is to lose

IMMATERIAL (Undelivered Lectures series)
LAUREN MARKHAM
Transit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms.

“I am in need of a word,” writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost—a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what’s to come?

In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative—the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a “ghost forest” of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park—in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create “a psychic space for feeling” while spurring action and agitating for change?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The issue many of us have been braying about for a generation now has burst upon us unmissably. The climate has changed. The results are blatantly obvious and the profiteers, mainly insurance companies and oil companies at the moment, are raking in the money out of your pockets.

The other costs, the ones not as tangible as lost spending power, are still to be named, and still to be felt. Until we can name something, like "spending power," it's nebulous to us as linear-time-trapped people. What name can we give to sights we will never see again? To descendants who can never be born, or can't be kept alive? To lives unlivable, to thoughts unthinkable, because there was/is no one trained, taught, allowed to think them?

Author Markham does the heavy lifting of identifying this dawning reality for us. She asks us to make room in our heads and hearts for an unbearable, unthinkably terrible, loss we're not making room for. It takes a person to speak a truth for it to be recognized. This truth, still nameless, is spoken, and it's now in our collective court to put a stop to our losses before they mount up in reality.

There is something like a haunting, a poltergeist infestation, in the idea of absences as losses. The absence of children unborn, of life...not unlived, nor even unlivable, simply "un"...impossible to experience this void of Reality unless one's alerted to it. Author Markham's essay, tight and compact of duration, carries resonances forward into time for her readers, makes patterns of thought that, now they exist, are indelible. An example of how the "un" is real....

Time's weird at the simplest level...what is it? explain it and how you know what it is, I'll wait...but when bent like this, when folded into a curve that feels untraversable, it begins to feel physical to me. I can respond to time in a new way, not a fun way but a new one, thanks to Author Markham. Immaterial is an ironic title for something that, through its power of observation alone, caused me to concpetualize time as a physical, separate entity from my world. Its positing of conditional loss, of non-existence as a loss, is a powerful insight I'd never have come up with on my own.

I won't get all the way to a fifth star because I felt at times a punch being pulled, an implication she knew was too much being avoided. The rigorous honesty of the piece was incomplete, partial; but I'd be extremely hard pressed to do half so well as Author Markham's done. Don't allow my weird frisson to dissuade you from wrapping your head around her arguments.