Jonathan Carroll, Fanny Howe, Murray Bail, Umberto Eco, and more...

INTERVIEWS

The Complete Rain Taxi Interview with Jonathan Carroll
Interviewed by Alan DeNiro and Kelly Everding
We sat for a spell with the Vienna-based novelist Jonathan Carroll at the World Fantasy Convention, where we talked about Europe and America, genre fiction and poetry, and the mysteries of the heart (both human and animal).

FEATURES

Questions or Answers
Essay by Fanny Howe
Author Fanny Howe discusses There by Etel Adnan and from the warring factions by Ammiel Alcalay, two books that speak poetry to politics.

Murray's Performance
Essay by Joel Turnipseed
Australian author Bail shines brightly in his latest U.S. release, Camouflage, though this masterful story collection is just the tip of the iceberg.

Mundus Senescit: Umberto Eco's Middle Ages
Essay by Summer Block
With the recent publication of Baudolino, Umberto Eco returns to writing fiction set in the Middle Ages - and creates an ultimate symbol for medieval thought and history.

Worlds to Save
Essay by Ryder W. Miller
Whether through terraforming or pantropy, two new science fiction anthologies deliver a strange future.

REVIEWS: POETRY

Memory Cards & Adoption Papers
Susan Schultz
Schultz's new collection is a superbly engaging exploration at the intersection of sentence-based poetry and the writing of personal history. Reviewed by Hank Lazer

O Cidadán
Erin Moure
This Canadian poet's new book is so completely fresh, it makes a lot of contemporary American poetry look like dorm furniture from Target. Reviewed by Laura Mullen

The Seasons
Merrill Gilfillan
Gilfillan's poems are lovely, light on the surface, but packed beneath with minute particulars of place, memory and art. Reviewed by Dale Smith

Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002
Molly Peacock
The elegant verse forms of this essential collection lay out the joys and burdens of familial and sensual love. Reviewed by Corinne Robins

The Sense Record
Jennifer Moxley
The poems in Moxley's second full-length collection are absolutely postmodern, evoking a world in which Eros appears outside a two-car garage. Reviewed by Arielle Greenberg

Nice Hat. Thanks.
Joshua Beckman & Matthew Rohrer
Sounded out piece by shiny, sudden piece, these collaborative poems wander deliciously, probe curiously, then unpredictably turn on a heel. Reviewed by Jen Bervin

The Volcano Sequence
Alicia Ostriker
Ostriker's poems continue an atheist Jew's search and consequent conversations with god. Reviewed by Julie Drake

REVIEWS: NONFICTION

The World In Its Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time
edited by Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue
This mammoth volume traces the threads connecting the various schools and stances within the last fifty years of experimental poetry, including that being written today. Reviewed by Chris McCreary

Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil
Caetano Veloso
The Tropicalia movement, launched in response to American cultural hegemony as personified by the likes of Elvis Presley, is here laid bare by one of its crucial players. Reviewed by Dimitri Kaasan

An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887
Kevin J. Hayes
George Nellis (1865-1948) rode a bicycle from New York state to San Francisco in 1887 - setting an imprecise but impressive transcontinental cycling record. Reviewed by Doug Nufer

Weird Sex and Snowshoes and Other Canadian Film Phenomena
Katherine Monk
This book is an interesting primer and valuable catalog for beginning a journey into Canadian cinema today. Reviewed by Brian K. Bergen-Aurand

Cogito, Ergo, Sum: The Life of René Descartes
Richard Watson
In this new biography of Descartes, Watson writes as a skeptic, placing the Great Man theories in doubt. Reviewed by Brian Charles Clark

French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion
Jean-Robert Pitte
Why did France, rather than Italy or Austria or Spain, become the center of world gastronomy? Discover for yourself. Bon appetit! Reviewed by John Toren

Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art
edited by Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet
An intriguing volume of essays by educators that deal with the connections between verbal and visual art. Reviewed by Thomas Bell

Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History
N. E. H. Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer
This book has the very specific goal of attending to only one aspect of the abortion issue: the law as it has been addressed through the judicial branch of the federal government. Reviewed by Felicia Parsons

REVIEWS: GRAPHIC NOVEL

Astro Boy
Osamu Tezuka
Tezuka's 1950s comic-book creation offers a bittersweet vision of love and loyalty in 2003. Reviewed by Tosh Berman

REVIEWS: FICTION

Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories
Maxine Chernoff
A master of indirection and irony, attitude and empathy, Maxine Chernoff charts the inscrutable and the mundane in this new selection of stories. Reviewed by Chris Semansky

The Big Snow
David Park
In the spirit of Joyce's "The Dead," Park's fiction evokes a pre-modern Irish landscape, which seems to be dissolving even as it unfolds. Reviewed by Peter Ritter

Farewells to Plasma
Natasza Goerke
Immersed in Goerke's wonderfully disconcerting world of marriageable she-bears, writers who choke to death on egg yolks, and a charming couple called the Zeroes, you'll want to read on. Reviewed by Laird Hunt

After the Quake
Haruki Murakami
In this new volume of stories, Murakami's characters hover between natural disaster and the terrorist kind, and their usual fragility and isolation takes on a new poignancy. Reviewed by Emily Johnston

Himalayan Dhaba
Craig Danner
Surrounded by the soaring Himalayas in a remote town of Northern India, Himchall Mission Hospital lures geriatric internist Mary Davis to volunteer her services in this lively and spiritual tale. Reviewed by H. E. Everding

You Shall Know Our Velocity
Dave Eggers
A little art never killed anybody, so it won't kill you to check out this intriguing on-the-road narrative by the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Reviewed by Clarence Thrun

Some of the Parts
T Cooper
Cooper creates flawed but vital characters who live and behave within the fiction, rather than being over-determined by it. Reviewed by David Lenson

Agape Agape
William Gaddis
Four years after Gaddis's death, Viking has released this new novel - a dramatic monologue drenched with the palpable urgency of a dying genius. Reviewed by Vincent Czyz