Interviews
20 Questions for Jordan Ellenberg
Jordan Ellenberg's new novel, The Grasshopper King, follows the misadventures of a foul-mouthed misanthropic poet in a small American college. Ellenberg, a math teacher at Princeton, discusses his raucous campus tale as well as the lure of checkers, the pathos of baseball, and the pleasures of one-man languages.
Shifting the Subject:
an interview with kari edwards
Poet, artist, and gender activist kari edwards plays with gender construction and the impossibility of a stabilized identity in her new novel, a day in the life of p. In this interview edwards talks about the construction and deconstruction of the subject in experimental writing.
Tales of a Jargonaut:
the complete Rain Taxi interview with Jonathan Williams
Perhaps best known as the publisher of the Jargon Society, publishing works by such luminaries as Charles Olson, Paul Metcalf, and Lorine Niedecker, Williams also has an international reputation as a poet, essayist, and photographer. This is the full-length interview with this "jocular and curmudgeonly" writer.
Features
Alphabets Upside-down: the voice of Bei Dao
Bei Dao is one of the creators of a new tradition in Chinese poetry, making him seem all the more innovative when placed alongside poets in this language. Metaphor, exile, and the challenges of translation create the montage that is his unique and powerful voice.
Reviews
POETRY REVIEWS
Complete Fiction
Serge Fauchereau
Fauchereau's writing fluctuates between the memoirs of a solitary traveler and patently fictional landscapes and events; these are brilliant renovations translated from the French by Ron Padgett and John Ashbery.
As Ever
Selected Poems
Joanne Kyger
This gathering presents an awesome range of poems with a stunning developmental narrative baseline, from Joanne Kyger's discovery of her "voice" on through 40-some years of evolution into one of the leading literary voices of her generation.
Blind Huber
Nick Flynn
A mysterious and entrancing sequence of short lyrics that journeys through the violent, erotic, and even gothic world of the honeybee, Nick Flynn's pocket-sized volume Blind Huber feels appropriately like a combination of prayer book and field guide.
Given
Arielle Greenberg
In this debut collection of poems, Arielle Greenberg makes dazzling explorations into the secrets embedded in language.
Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
Carole Maso
Sampling freely from the biographies of Kahlo, Maso creates an intricate weave of words, allowing her own imagination to converse with Kahlo.
Raising Eyebrows
Gary Barwin
In his most recent collection, poet Gary Barwin contemplates the unexpected weirdness of the mundane.
Translating Mo'um
Cathy Park Hong
As a Korean-American, Hong exhibits the split identity and alienation from Anglo-American culture in this fierce debut book of poems.
Flow Blue
Sarah Kennedy
The confessional quality of these poems don't necessarily reveal Kennedy's life, but rather the braided sequence of a violent and tepid rural existence.
FICTION REVIEWS
Frontera Dreams
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
In this seventh novel featuring Taibo's beleaguered sleuth, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne has endured myriad wounds, slashes, and lacerations, rendering him unrecognizable even to himself-a metaphor for society?
Stomping the Goyim
Michael Disend
Recently re-issued by Green Integer, Disend's 1969 poetic novel moves muscularly across the battlefields of a country ravaged by spiritual war on all fronts.
Gilgamesh
Joan London
London sends her protagonist Edith on a journey as improbable, and as full of youthful willfulness and naiveté, as any archetypal journey in epic literature.
Pattern Recognition
William Gibson
With his eighth book, futurist William Gibson opens new doors while resolutely keeping a finger on the pulse of the electronic underground, where identification as well as information has become the currency of choice.
Any Human Heart
William Boyd
Boyd's new novel reads like something you might find in the musty attic of a family home, open with mild curiosity, and then read straight through, fascinated by the engaging, detailed evocation of one individual's thoughts throughout a long life.
World Light
Halldór Laxness
In this Icelandic novel, written in 1937 by Nobel Prize-winner Halldór Laxness, the reader will follow the wretched life of Olafur, a sickly orphan coming alive to possibility and further tragedy.
A Shortcut in Time
Charles Dickinson
This time-travel tale offers a world that can be shaped by its characters, even if they aren't always in complete control of that shaping.
Forever
Pete Hamill
Forever is an epic chronicle not only of the life of a man but the birth of one of America's most vibrant and diverse cities, with all the blood, sacrifices, and human frailties that great cities require.
NONFICTION REVIEWS
Dreaming War
Gore Vidal
Vidal continues to rail against what he considers America's evil empire with his characteristically acerbic verve, updating his arguments to address the conflict in Iraq.
The Flâneur
Edmund White
Edmund White navigates a Paris that is increasingly stranded by history, his idiosyncratic observations the perfect antidote to the typically weary American tourist.
Songbook
Nick Hornby
Songbook is essentially a mix tape of novelist Nick Hornby's writings about his favorite pop songs--not albums, not bands, but songs.
The Forest of Souls
Rachel Pollack
A metaphysical study detailing a new way of looking at Tarot cards and their use, Pollack's new book advocates a meditative, almost holistic method of divination.
A Convent Tale
P. Renée Baernstein
Baernstein narrates the tumultuous history of the Barnabites and Angelics, an order of nuns in 16th-century Italy who suffered harsh restrictions within the walls of their convent.
Holocaust Girls
S.L. Wisenberg
Wisenberg writes to maintain connection between the past that haunts her and the present in which she struggles to understand her identity as a Jewish-American woman living in a post-Holocaust world.
The House of Blackwood
Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era
David Finkelstein
Finkelstein examines the fluctuating fortunes of the 19th-century publishing world, an era when bourgeois sensibilities gained ascendancy once and for all in Great Britain.
Priceless Children
American Photographs 1890-1925
Child Labor and the Pictorialist Ideal
George Dimock, Tom Beck, Verna Posever Curtis, and Patricia J. Fanning
Featuring photographers associated with the Pictorialist Movement, this book balances empathetic child labor photographs with Dimock's argument that the photographers undermined their socialist ideals with self-indulgent art.