Jennifer Croft

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Poetry knows that the political rests on forgetting the unforgettable.

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting

Alexander Maksik’s second novel portrays a young Liberian woman named Jacqueline who does little more than meander Santorini, an island in the Aegean that features beaches of lava pebbles and sand in red and black and white, and yet she astonishes, soothes, and horrifies us with perfect efficiency, making A Marker to Measure Drift a masterpiece.

There is the precision of the protagonist’s voice; there are the island’s elements, rendered palpable—its white hot light, in the beginning, and then … Read More »