Martin Puchner, Cris Mazza, Sarah Churchwell, Lance Olsen, Vivian Maier, Dave Eggers, Kelly Luce, & more . . .
INTERVIEWS
Poetry of the Revolution: An Interview with Martin Puchner
Interviewed by Louis Bourgeois
Philosopher and literary critic Martin Puchner discusses the proliferation of political and art manifestos in the 19th and 20th centuries, and his compulsion to study them.
An Invisible Interview with Cris Mazza
Interviewed by Andrew Farkas
Cris Mazza discusses her new memoir, Something Wrong With Her—a book about ‘sexual dysfunction’ and the social difficulties that have ensued in her life from this ‘problem.’
The World Behind Gatsby: An Interview with Sarah Churchwell
Interviewed by Mark Gustafson
Churchwell discusses her recent book, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, placing Fitzgerald’s novel in the context of its tumultuous times.
An Illuminated Interview with Lance Olsen
Interviewed by John Madera
If the job of the writer is to learn to pay attention to the world, Lance Olsen succeeds vigorously with his intricately connected and illuminated works on paper.
FEATURES
Name Upon Name: Encountering Pauline Réage • Dominique Aury • Anne Desclos
Essay by Gregory Stephenson
Stephenson delves into the story behind Story of O and it’s elusive author.
The Seeing I: The Photography of Vivian Maier
Essay by Susan Buechler
Completely unknown in her lifetime, Vivian Maier shot a roll of film a day from the 1950s to the 1990s, and three new books display the stealthy passion that ruled her life.
REVIEWS: POETRY
Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story
Michael Rothenberg
Rothenberg’s new book of poems is a lament for the indecencies and hypocrisies of 21st-century America. Reviewed by Eric Hoffman
Sign You Were Mistaken
Seth Landman
Landman’s poems confront themes of cognition, perspective, individuality, agency, and posterity. Reviewed by Will Wlizlo
Four Swans
Greg Pape
Apart from an excursion east to bury his mother’s ashes, Pape’s poems are firmly rooted in the landscape of western Montana. Reviewed by Warren Woessner
Small Batch: An Anthology of Bourbon Poetry
Edited by Leigh Anne Hornfeldt and Teneice Durrant
The bourbon-related poems of Small Batch go down smoothly. Reviewed by Lauren Gordon
American Amnesiac
Diane Raptosh
Raptosh attempts something quite unusual here—a long poem spoken in the persona of an older man suffering from amnesia. Reviewed by Daniela Gioseffi
The Dailiness
Lauren Camp
Camp’s stirring new poetry collection has scope, complexity, and amplitude—a work of fine poetic intelligence. Reviewed by Richard Oyama
Christian Name
Lawrence Giffin
Disturbing and bitter, haunting and at times bizarre, Lawrence Giffin’s collection of sequences and stand-alone poems can look like “theory,” or like collage, but it’s far more. Reviewed by Stephen Burt
REVIEWS: CHAPBOOKS
Jim’s Book: New Poems
James Reidel
Reidel’s poems work their way into one’s consciousness via extended, sometimes jarring metaphors. Reviewed by James Naiden
Das Gedichtete (Un Thème et Variations Poétique)
Patrick James Dunagan
This nuanced long poem on the music of Adorno brings to mind a past Modernist time. Reviewed by James Yeary
REVIEWS: MIXED GENRE
Kala Pani
Monica Mody
Kala Pani brings together theater, folklore, faux-journalism, the suspending enjambments of poetry, and the disruptions and connections of electronic media in a fascinating formal pastiche. Reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson
Boxing the Compass
Sandy Florian
Sandy Florian’s Boxing the Compass defies categorization, subverts genre, and reframes our ideas of what story and language can do. Reviewed by Peter Grandbois
REVIEWS: FICTION
Captain Cap, His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks
& The Adventures of Captain Cap
Alphonse Allais
Coincidentally, two different translations of a collection of sketches by the heretofore little-translated 19th-century French comic writer Alphonse Allais were published recently. Reviewed by M. Kasper
The Circle
Dave Eggers
Eggers postulates what the world might look like if an internet technology company dominated the globe with universal membership. Reviewed by Jason Harris
Others of My Kind
James Sallis
This slim crime drama follows the story of atypical Jenny who, abducted as a child, is found living feral in a mall and is shuffled through the foster system. Reviewed by Robert Martin
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail
Kelly Luce
In her first collection of short stories, Kelly Luce explores relationships, love, and death within the unique world of Japan. Reviewed by Ashley Wiley
Sleeping with Gypsies
Ginny MacKenzie
MacKenzie’s novel is framed as a quasi-memoir penned by Amanda—noctambulist, civil rights activist, artist, muse, mother—as she twinkles through memories. Reviewed by Benjamin Woodard
Death of the Black-Haired Girl
Robert Stone
Amidst a setting of leafy academe, Stone creates a distinctly American setting that is teetering on a precipice of madness and violence. Reviewed by Stephen Hartwell
The Skin
Curzio Malaparte
Malaparte presents his reader with the unreal world of Naples, just after the Allied invasion in 1943—a city of poverty and prostitution, black marketeers and American GIs. Reviewed by Andrew Marzoni
REVIEWS: NONFICTION
A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting
Richard Burton
Burton succeeds in tying together the many diverse strands of Basil Bunting’s complicated, often agonizingly contradictory life. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
ArtSpeak: A Guide To Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 To The Present
Robert Atkins
ArtSpeak makes for a fantastic home reference manual on the art world.
Reviewed by Mason Riddle
Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter
Alyn Shipton
It’s taken nearly twenty years after his death for a full-length biography of Harry Nilsson to hit the shelves, and it’s well worth the wait. Reviewed by Britt Aamodt
The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking
Olivia Laing
Laing emotively employs the works of six great American writers, their biographical content, and her own history in an attempt to dissect alcoholism and the seeming relation it has with writers. Reviewed by Matthew Schneeman