With Words and Song: An Interview with John Trudell
Interviewed by Christopher Luna
John Trudell first came into the public eye as the spokesperson for the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. His recorded work combines his lyrics and poems with traditional Native music as well as rock and roll.

A New Day Rising: An Interview with David Swanson
Interviewed by Bob Sommer
David Swanson’s first book traces the growth and concentration of power in the Executive Branch of government—a radical change that has altered, and now threatens, the very fabric of the republic.

These Kinds of Things Just Happen in Winnipeg: An Interview with Guy Maddin
Interviewed by Jacob Eichert
Maddin’s films, often in black and white, sometimes silent, tremble with a libidinal enmity for technical sophistication.

Cris Mazza and the Cartography of Narrative
Essay by Kathryn Mueller
What happens when we map the work of a writer of "layered" literary fiction?

Widely Unavailable
Essay by Steve Moncada Street
Sergio Ramírez's thirty-year-old novel To Bury Our Fathers, now out of print, evokes a world formed and deformed by the same kind of global economic disparities and culture/ideology clashes we still debate.

A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore
In her new, long-awaited novel, Moore skewers the bellicose and deluded, wielding fate’s fickleness and kindly noting its cruelty. Reviewed by Kevin Lynch

What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Damion Searls
Searls’s first book of fiction is remarkable for its humor, its erudition, and for what it does with existing literary texts. Reviewed by Brooks Sterritt

Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín
Tóibín’s sixth novel opens in the author’s hometown in Ireland, where a young student decides to escape economic hardship and seek a new life in America. Reviewed by Suzann Clemens

A Priceless Nest
Kristiina Ehin
The short, intense stories in this collection reflect the Estonian Ehin’s poetic roots as she creates strange worlds populated with otherworldly characters. Reviewed by Rebecca Farivar

The City & the City
China Miéville
The master of urban fantasy concocts a world in which sister-cities abhor each other to the point of creating an extreme bureaucratic and racial nightmare. Reviewed by Will Wlizlo

Generosity: An Enhancement
Richard Powers
Powers explores the enigmatic and elusive emotional state of happiness, and how too close of an examination into its source can destroy it. Reviewed by Allan Vorda

The Resurrectionist
Jack O’Connell
Part-fantasy, part-noir detective fiction, this novel delves into the murky lines of reality, blurring spacetime, dream, and narrative. Reviewed by Vincent Czyz

Fugue State
Brian Evenson
Abetted by cartoonist Zak Sally's illustrations, Evenson's latest collection of short stories flirts with horror and humor as it leads us through apocalypse, plague, and real-world terrors. Reviewed by Katie Haegele

White is for Witching
Helen Oyeyemi
Oyeyemi's third novel succeeds by being simultaneously a ghost story and a tale of young love, a saga of childhood lost and an allegory on fear-fueled politics. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

Delhi Noir
Edited by Hirsh Sawhney
A diverse collection of writers, few of whom readers in this country will have already encountered, portray the seedier sides of life in India’s capital. Their stories are noir, but they’re also news. Reviewed by Rav Grewal-Kök

Rex
José Manuel Prieto
Rex is a philosophical fiction in the genre of the thriller, a noir novel mixed with questions of language, fabrication, and perception. Reviewed by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Do Time Get Time
Andrei Rubanov
Rubanov's debut novel is a semi-autobiographical handbook-of-the-revolution for Russia's post-1991 entrepreneurs. Reviewed by Matthew Thrasher

REVIEWS: YOUNG ADULT FICTION

Bones of Fairie
Janni Lee Simmer
Simmer’s debut young adult novel gives us the story of Liza, a fifteen-year-old girl forced to navigate through the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic world—and through the broken remains of her basic assumptions about this world, and how it works. Reviewed by Will Alexander

REVIEWS: NONFICTION

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?
Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank
Two philosophers discuss the “religious turn” in contemporary philosophy, and the possibilities that religious models present for politico-economic revolution. Reviewed by Jeremy Biles

Do-Over!
Robin Hemley
Hemley returns to ten unsavory disappointments of his youth, providing a bevy of cultural insights and non-didactic “teaching” moments along the way. Reviewed by Virginia Konchan

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Michael Pollan
Pollan convincingly argues against “nutritionism”—the drive to create imitation food-like substances that have been altered by the processed food industries and then enriched with vitamins. Reviewed by Alexander Deley

You Know What I Mean?: Words, Contexts and Communication
Ruth Wajnryb
Wajnryb attempts to tackle the oddities of meaning: how certain words and phrases have developed over time, how they behave, what forces dictate the changes in language today, and why we choose the words we do. Reviewed by Abby Travis

Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism
Woden Teachout
Teachout takes on the tricky business of the American Flag and its symbolism throughout American history. Reviewed by Bob Sommer

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
Gerald Martin
A new biography of the Nobel laureate offers great insight into the author’s complex life of struggles with others and with himself as he created some of the most unforgettable fiction of the last fifty years. Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

REVIEWS: POETRY

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: a Bilingual Anthology
Edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman
This uniqiue anthology should usher in a new era of translation of Latin American poetry, one that is long overdue. Reviewed by John Herbert Cunningham

Warhorses
Yusef Komunyakaa
Komunyakaa’s most recent collection of poetry is a lyrical contemplation of humankind’s wardrive, as well as a much-needed consideration of our country’s militaristic role in recent history. Reviewed by Miguel Murphy

The Alps
Brandon Shimoda
There’s a meditative feel to Shimoda’s work, a wandering in the lines, yet a certain precision unfolds in his descriptions of the famed Swiss mountain range. Reviewed by Craig Santos Perez

Thanksgiving Dawn
John Graber
Graber has traveled a long road to his first collection, Thanksgiving Dawn, which collects poems from the 1970s to the present. Reviewed by Emilio DeGrazia

Versed
Rae Armantrout
Preoccupied with modes of communication and intentions, Versed is the poetry of this and that; its poems do not waver in their determination to sort out what goes with what. Reviewed by Todd Pederson

World’s End
Pablo Neruda
Looking back at the twentieth century, Pablo Neruda wrote this reflective book-length poem, tallying both personal mistakes and the bloody events of “the age of ashes.” Reviewed by John Bradley

I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński
Translated by Kiana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba
Contrary to our appetite for downtrodden Eastern European poets, Kapuściński should be read as an artist who managed to “make it” in Soviet Poland, a highly public figure who took calculated risks and survived. Reviewed by Amy Groshek

Rapid Eye Movement
Peter Jaeger
With two simultaneously running discourses, one from the dream world and the other from various social discourses pertaining to dreams, this book serves as “a record of our culture dreaming.” Reviewed by Chris Pusateri

REVIEWS: GRAPHIC NOVELS

Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
In his first solo graphic novel, Mazzucchelli revels in the art form, producing a harmonious and revelatory arrangement of image and word. Reviewed by Britt Aamodt

Unknown Soldier: Haunted House
Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli
This disquieting and enthralling graphic novel takes on the bloody Ugandan war, offering a twist on the trope of the masked avenger in the process. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

You’ll Never Know: A Graphic Memoir
C. Tyler
Modeled on a scrapbook, Tyler’s newest book is a tribute to craftsmanship, much like the home repair we see her father, the “good and decent man” of the title, often undertaking. Reviewed by Ken Chen

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009