by Eric Lorberer and Kelly Everding Colin Wilson burst onto the literary scene in 1956 with the publication of The Outsider; since then he has written over 100 books in nearly every conceivable genre. In the following interview, he talks at length about what led him to become such a prolific writer and about the […]
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Florence Delay, Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Sonja Greenlee, Harry Mathews, Mark Polizzotti, Olivier Rolin Lumen Editions & Alyscamps Press ($12.95) by Kelly Everding With only a few points of plot to go by, seven authors piece together a story that races through the minds of its various narrators--people who know and/or love S., a.k.a. Sue, […]
Busted Scotch W. W. Norton ($23) Seven Stories AK Press Audio ($13.98) by Carolyn Kuebler James Kelman's stories brilliantly render the amorphous, often wordless world of the mind as it putters about, not even thinking so much as just tending to its daily business. On the spoken word CD Seven Stories, he reads: I have […]
An Interview with Richard Grossman Richard Grossman is a poet masquerading as a novelist. In both his first novel, The Alphabet Man, and his newest effort, The Book of Lazarus, Grossman concocts a dizzying amalgam of genres and voices, typographical daring and visual sophistication. But it is the spirit of poetry that haunts his pages, […]
Edited by Jeffrey Skinner and Sarah Gorham Sarabande Books ($14.95) by Brett Ralph In the introduction to Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, & Deliverance, Jeffrey Skinner recounts the familiar list of writers whose lives were wrecked by alcoholism, earning it that dubious title, "the writer's disease." But alcoholism and addiction, he suggests, are problems […]
(Memory Stand-Ins) Keith Waldrop Avec ($8.95) by David Clippinger Keith Waldrop's The Silhouette of the Bridge is a sustained meditation upon the relationship of knowledge, experience, memory, and spirituality, and especially how that relationship is sometimes reconciled and sometimes troubled by the act of writing. As Waldrop writes, We capture what we can by rendering […]
Jorie Graham Ecco Press ($22) by Eric Lorberer Perhaps a summing up is in order: Jorie Graham's first two books, with their deftly spun yet tightly reined poems, introduced her as a poet of immense lyric capabilities. Her third book, The End of Beauty, exploded the very idea of lyric wide open, scattering it into […]
Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn translated by Tyler Austin and Nicholas Levis Black Rose Books ($19.99) by Charisse Gendron Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger compiles two German-language books on piracy published in the 1990s: Women Pirates, by Ulrike Klausmann and Marion Meinzerin, and Life under the Death's Head, by […]
The Lives and Times of Sun Ra John F. Szwed Pantheon Books ($29.95) by Brad Zellar The list of jazz figures long overdue for decent biographical treatment is a lengthy one, but there is perhaps no one whose life and career seemed a more promising project for biographer and reader alike than the preternaturally singular […]