Interviews
Our Very Greatest Human Thing Is Wild: an Interview with Brenda Hillman
Brenda Hillman discusses the unique position she holds as a poet, straddling lyric and postmodern aesthetics in an increasingly antipodean poetic community.
"Failure. Building. Embrace" : an Interview with Joseph McElroy
One of contemporary fiction's most inventive wordsmiths, Joseph McElroy discourses on the aesthetics of his novels in his inimitable style.
Architecture of Absence : an Interview with Craig Watson
Unaffiliated with any poetic school, Craig Watson discusses the recurring dynamics in his work.
Features
Collecting Speculative Fiction
An essay/review of
The Silver Gryphon
edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern
and Angel Body
edited by Chris Reed and David Memmott
Two new anthologies of speculative fiction from small independent publishers tackle the permeability of genre.
Reviews
FICTION
Platform
Michel Houellebecq
If the pure product of America is insanity, what have we gotten from the French--le petit mort and the bitter rant? Houellebecq has again combined the two in Platform.
The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem
Meet the next contender for the Great American Novel--Jonathan Lethem's sprawling epic in which the lives of two child superheroes careen toward dark adult fates.
Wolf Dreams
Yasmina Khadra
Khadra offers an intensely stark and provocative portrait of the culture of violence in contemporary Algeria in the person of Walid, an aspiring actor who gets swallowed up in the military-religious fervor of the Islamic Salvation Front.
Waiting for an Angel
Helon Habila
Confronting the legacy of political imprisonment in Africa, Habila follows the life of an aspiring Nigerian writer who becomes a journalist and is subsequently imprisoned.
Ten Little Indians
Sherman Alexie
In this collection of nine stories, Alexie challenges many stereotypes people have about American Indians, including those held by Indians themselves.
One More For The Road
Ray Bradbury
One of the best short story writers ever, Bradbury offers a new collection of 25 wondrous stories of the fantastic and the macabre.
NONFICTION
Surrealism and Painting
André Breton
Celebrate the republication of this out-of-print gem from Surrealism's most outspoken proponent.
To Have and To Hold
Phillip Blom
Blom illustrates the ideological differences in collecting through colorful biographies of collectors who were lurid, weird, daring, polymathic, and dark, and considers them from every angle in the context of social change.
The Middle Mind
Curtis White
Destined to become the pop-intellectual scandal of the season, White's latest collection of essays attempts to awaken America to a more socially-engaged imagination.
The Constructivist Moment
Barrett Watten
Much less a book for Russian scholars than for those interested in literary theory, contemporary poetry, and American cultural studies, The Constructivist Moment collects Watten's essays from the last ten years.
Fire in a Canebrake
Laura Wexler
Wexler explores the true story but still unsolved mystery of the last mass lynching in America.
POETRY
The New Directions Anthology of Chinese Poetry
edited by Eliot Weinberger
Just as a translator must compromise between fidelity to the original text and creating a well-written and moving poem in English, Weinberger's anthology presents both the range of classical Chinese poetry and a catalogue of translations to compare and contrast.
Sand
Dennis Phillips
In his ninth collection of poems, Phillips's beautifully sedate work places pressure on syntax in order to yield an opening away from familiarity.
All Around What Empties Out
Linh Dinh
Dinh addresses the lessons of architectural structure in the form of poetry, creating new ways to break into a poem like a thief may break into a "house with no doors."
Rattlesnake Plantain
Heidi Greco
The pairing of a poisonous snake and a wild plant in the title may give you a hint of the otherworldly landscape of these poems.
Ode Ode
Michael Farrell
Channeling Frank O'Hara, Farrell performs feats of daring elisions and jarring enjambments with lots of fast-talking whimsy.
The Good Kiss
George Bilgere
Bitterness. Nostalgia. Anger. Love. Humor. Wonder. Bilgere can do it all in a single poem.