Juan José Saer
translated by Steve Dolph
Open Letter ($14.95)

by Scott Bryan Wilson

Angel Leto and an acquaintance named The Mathematician—who, deeply tanned and always dressed in all white, “seems less like a flesh and bone person than one of those archetypes you see on billboards, those for whom every contingency inherent to humanity has disappeared”—walk twenty-one blocks together through the city, discussing a party celebrating politician Jorge Washington Noriega’s sixty-fifth birthday despite the fact that neither of them were in attendance. In long, clause-on-clause sentences, this ambling conversation forms the basic plot of Argentinian Juan José Saer’s novel The Sixty-Five Years of Washington.

The peripatetic plot is merely a device for Saer to try out unconventional methods of narration and storytelling, all while relating the form to the content. The novel asks the reader to learn to read in a new way, as the details of the story itself are unfolded very slowly, with many pages going by between lines of dialogue. Everything is related in a very fragmentary way, seemingly to echo a thought the Mathematician had during a dream, in which there exists an “elemental mechanical paradox that demonstrates that motionlessness is what creates motion, that motion is simply a reference to motionlessness.” Some of the novel is narrated in a straightforward manner, as when the Mathematician tells a story in which he attempted to discuss his treatise called The Fourteen Points Toward All Future Meter with a celebrated poet (strangely, perhaps, one of the novel’s most gripping sections). At times, however, the narrator just slams everything to halt, and seems to focus on these moments of motionlessness and possibility, as in this early bit:

It is, as we know, morning: though it doesn’t make sense to say so, since it is always the same time—once again the sun, since the earth revolves, apparently, has given the illusion of rising, from the direction they call the east, in the blue expanse we call sky, and, little by little, after the dawn, after daybreak, it has reached a spot high enough, halfway in its ascent let’s say, so that, through the intensity of what we call light, we refer, to the state that results, as the morning—a spring morning when, again, though, as we were saying, it is always the same time, the temperature has been rising, the clouds have been dissipating, and the trees which, for some reason, had been losing their leaves bit by bit, have begun to bloom again, to blossom once more, although, as we were saying, it is always the same, the only Time and, so to speak, from equinox to solstice, it’s the same, no?

It’s a kind of writing that certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but Saer often pulls back, offering slightly more succinct descriptions, such as when Leto and the Mathematician evade obstacles on their walk: “simultaneously [they] bent their left leg, lifting it over the cable with the intention, more unconscious than calculated, of planting the bottom of their foot on the sidewalk, no? Alright then: they plant their feet.” (Those “no?”s that appear here are sprinkled all over the novel, as a reminder that there is a listener who is not a part of the story.)

The narrator jumps far into the future at times, explaining the ends of lives before we’ve even seen the end of the twenty-one blocks, and then back to the present, to slow the narrative back to barely moving. Saer plays a lot with this, all while peppering the novel with many quote-worthy sections, such as the Mathematician’s hatred of the “bloodlust bourgeoisie,” or this aside regarding another acquaintance, Tomatis, “for whom every example of the female sex whose measurements in the chest, waist, and thighs did not correspond to those of Miss Universe [was] an indistinct and transparent creature,” and the general nonstop flow of wisdom from the Mathematician, who insists that “whosoever looks to swim unaided in the colorless river of postulates, syllogistic modes, categories, and definitions should accompany his studies with a strict dietary regimen: fed on yogurts and blanched vegetables, the abstract order of everything, in its utmost simplicity, will be revealed, ecstatic and radiant, to the relentless, recently bathed ascetic.”

Saer makes use of that “utmost simplicity” with his easy plot, while ecstatically and radiantly writing of “the abstract order of everything” as well. It’s not a perfect novel—even at a slim 203 pages, it’s a bit overlong and the middle passage gets tiresome—but the opening and closing thirds are phenomenal, demonstrating a dazzling unification of form and function.

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Skip Horack
Counterpoint ($15.95)

by Billy Reynolds

Reading a novel whose protagonist is a pygmy tribesman captured and sold into slavery (and whose canines and incisors have been filed into sharp points), you might become too conscious of the hero’s “otherness.” But this is not the case in Skip Horack’s first novel, The Eden Hunter. Horack, a former Stegner fellow and the recipient of the 2009 Bakeless Prize for his short story collection The Southern Cross, has here written a novel that is an effective mixture of the empathetic tradition and the best work of Cormac McCarthy.

Much of The Eden Hunter focuses on Kau’s life five years after being sold into slavery, when he flees into the Spanish Florida wilderness. His seemingly impossible quest is to find someplace like Africa: “That morning there had been a strong south wind and he had smelled salt air. How to say it? How to say that he somehow needed to see open waters?” From this excerpt, we can perhaps guess Kau’s ultimate destination, but his passage through a subtropical frontier of pinelands and lowlands littered with misfits and murderers is as compelling as the suspense surrounding his journey:

He was lying on his stomach in a purple field of blooming meadow-rue, his face buried in the folds of the saddlebags so as to block out the midday sun, when he heard the low buzzing of a honeybee. For a moment he wondered if all his pining for his home had finally confused his mind. He turned his head and opened his swollen eyes. The bee was hovering close, and he reached for it as if somehow hoping to prove the reality of the thing.

Kau is in pursuit of another life, but it is in his nature to reflect on the landscape’s natural beauty: “Kau lingered in camp until they were gone. A breeze came and the river cane swayed all around. He heard water frogs in the distance and could smell the river. It felt good to be alone and so he lingered still.” That Kau ultimately discovers the hidden resources of forest, lowland, river, and island speaks to his inner strength and steadiness, as well as his skill as a survivor. In his search for a place to call his own, he takes advantage of the raw materials life offers him: “a small knob of oak lying loose near a woodpile” that he fashions into a drawknife of sorts, a rowboat hidden in palmettos growing along a river bank, and a honeybee colony whose hive he considers “like a lost and frantic captain chasing seabirds across open water, all the while praying for land.”

What ultimately separates Horack’s The Eden Hunter from most other contemporary southern novels is its vision of humanity. Though violent, there is a dogged sweetness always limping behind the torture and the killing, moving slowly on its way across the Apalachicola River, drifting south toward the Gulf of Mexico, and finally seizing on the image of a man dancing in his solitary way “for the attention of some heathen god.”

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Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell
University of Iowa Press ($16)

by Lauren E. Tyrrell

Books based on calamities frequently gain quick popularity with their topical subjects, such as Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun on Hurricane Katrina. The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti, however, reminds readers of a country that struggled with fear and poverty long before its recent serial disasters of earthquake, flood, and cholera outbreak. This fiction debut by Haiti native and poet Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell contains twelve short stories and one novella that paint a resilient culture, heavy with grief and confident in better days ahead—whether on earth or in an afterlife.

Haiti’s culture breathes through the collection’s assorted narrators. Grande Jesula, the Mother of Spirits, offers her wisdom to a young woman troubled by ill omens, revealing rituals of a people reliant on unseen forces that can and do alter their lives:

tonight, you light three candles on the floor. Arrange them in a triangle facing east or north. Place a glass of sugar water in the middle of the triangle. Stand and pray. Call out to all your Spirits—those on your mother’s side and those on your father’s side. Tell them your hopes.

A personified chapel narrates another story, offering a similarly poignant island portrait from its unique perspective: “Dogs neither sleep nor perch. They are tied down somewhere in the nearby slums whose gray fossils’ framework hangs amidst bushes at the foot of the mountain. It is as if everything is held, somehow, at the foot of something greater.” Powerful voices like these act as tour guides through Haiti’s singular society and blighted spots.

Many of these narrators have familial ties with other characters, though the collection may frustrate readers wishing to tease out a precise family tree. Characters receive minimal introduction. For example, “Down by the River” begins, “It is Saturday . . . so Angelina sits and waits by the phone. Most Saturdays she sits in the big office chair that used to be my father’s.” Here we meet three figures; however, instead of learning about them individually, we hear about a ritual that unites them. With this move, echoed in several stories, Phipps-Kettlewell succeeds in depicting the Haitian people as a community rather than emphasizing individual characters.

As might be expected, Phipps-Kettlewell also tackles weighty themes throughout The Company of Heaven. For example, the novella “River Valley Rooms” probes class conflict and, most memorably, the effect of AIDS on Haitian society. The narrator suggests that Alan, a vibrant homosexual, has spread AIDS to herself and her brother, Justin. Justin infected his wife and infant son, both deceased. Grappling with this widespread mortality, the narrator offers a terrifying view of death, as “water that slowly rises in the room, nearing the ceiling. There is little space left, and you try to stay above water. The ceiling is always too low, too close.” This narrator’s highly imagistic language limns AIDS’s protracted destruction of a life, rendering a moving firsthand account of the disease.

Phipps-Kettlewell balances the heaviness of those themes with a playful study of Haitian religions; the characters practice Christianity and Vodou in tandem, creating an interlaced spirituality that governs their lives. Take the priest, Djezél, in “Land”: he practices traditional Vodou ceremonies, such as placing land crabs on the heads of those afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases, while crediting God for his healing powers. “If something has happened,” Djezél explains, “God somehow allowed it. . . . People come to me with their problems and I do what I can.” Phipps-Kettlewell echoes his easygoing religious attitude in other characters, providing a unique look at the way these two religions coalesce in Haitian culture.

While not every piece here is equally successful, readers interested in the Caribbean and those involved in Haitian relief efforts will enjoy this perspective of Haiti. As one narrator in the collection describes the republic’s people: “We reshape ourselves from the void of hell. We are the people who can live how no people should, suffer what no people can spell out, the sacrificial lambs never comfortable on earth.”

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Alissa Nutting
Starcherone Books ($18)

by Peter Grandbois

Rarely does a reader experience an imagination pulsing with the vibrancy of Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Her bizarre stories inhabit the slipstream between literary fiction and science fiction, between fantasy and the fairy tale, all the while creating worlds where anything seems possible: “The medical adviser/cameraman tranquilizes Dick and straps him into a cocoon on the wall. It looks as though some giant spider caught him and hung him there. I keep watching the cargo door for a human-sized space arachnid to enter and devour him whole.” This passage is drawn from a story about a reality TV show called “Eat IT” where the winner gets to have anal sex on the moon with a porn star.

As that scenario might suggest, Nutting’s social satire bites as hard as George Saunders but with the frighteningly fabulist incisors of Julio Cortázar. Take the opening story “Dinner,” in which the narrator and several other characters sitting in a stewpot wait to be eaten by diners off screen. As the narrator boils, she tells herself, “You can bear anything . . . if you know you’re not alone.” That desire to connect with others propels each of the eighteen stories in this collection containing stories ranging in length from the two-page “Zookeeper”—where a zookeeper answers, “She was soft” when asked why she steals the zoo’s prize panda—to the twenty-six-page “Bandleader’s Girlfriend.”

More often than not, the need to connect leads to dissolution of the self, as is the case with the under-confident narrator of “Model’s Assistant,” caught in the gravitational pull of her beautiful boss: “I am feeling more visible by the second.” The desire to love another, to be part of something bigger, so often makes us feel small. Nutting’s dark catalog of desire extends beyond the human world, as in the story “Ant Colony,” where space on a future earth is so limited “it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies.” The actress narrator has holes drilled in her bones to house colonies of ants and soon finds herself lost in their united consciousness: “When my eyes were closed I could see various dark caves and swarming ant-limbs, and these images gradually started to feel preferential to anything I might view of the outer world.” As is so often the case in Nutting’s dementedly sublime fictions, what begins as an act of love, a joining with another, ends in desire that cannot be satisfied: “When I try to think, all I can feel is the sugary fluid, and a rage that comes when after our feedings I find myself hungry.”

Despite its dark tone, Nutting’s collection is anything but depressing, and readers may find themselves laughing out loud often at passages such as, “I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain. The guy next to me resembles Elvis because of his fluffy, vaguely-pubic black hairdo. It may be the humidity.” Morbid situations, desperate desires, and seismic humor make for a difficult recipe, but Nutting pulls it off with the panache of a master chef.

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Lori Ann Stephens
Blooming Tree Press ($23.95)

by Kristin Thiel

The mark of a well-written book is layers: “It sounded good, but there was a threat behind her words.” To be clear, after a quotation such as that, Song of the Orange Moons is not a thriller—except in the way that all coming-of-age stories are scary and exhilarating—but there is an intensity behind each of author Lori Ann Stephens’s carefully chosen words that makes this short yet still sprawling history of three females so enjoyable to read.

Three friends, two young and one their grandmother’s age, take turns narrating: Rebecka, the first child born to a stern missionary and a Colombian woman who still practices her people’s religion in secret; Helen, who battles her perceived desirability, the communal lifestyle of her boarding school, and her family’s Judaism by keeping a Journal of Touches; and Adelle, the elderly widow who eventually comes to speak not only for herself but also for Rebecka, Helen, and future members of their “family.”

It’s sweet that Stephens plays obviously with images, such as those of the sun and moon and water and things that make our legs itch, and with colors, orange, black, and violet. It’s downright beautiful when she links her ideas with themes unnamed: The sun and the moon are present in Rebecka’s mother’s arms, which move “mechanically in circles, in arches, as though if she stopped moving, a sadness would cave in all around her” while she obsessively fills the days after her son’s death making “casseroles and empanadas, breads, cakes, flan, and the refrigerator slowly filled each day with unbroken breads and sealed dishes.” Her tic of grief becomes a life-sustaining necessity, nourishing things being also inaccessible. Adelle, too, rolls and kneads dough that she knows won’t turn out: “I never made pastry rolls for the end result.”

There are several ways to portray young characters well, and many more ways to turn every descriptor into a blinking red arrow. Stephens is solidly in the former camp. At one point, Rebecka is “watching a loaf of bread tucked under a thin cloth”; at another, she describes a silence as so deep that “I can hear my nose whistle.” When their aunt says someone else changes her hair color “like a whore changes underwear,” Helen and her siblings giggle not at the first noun, of which they have no understanding, but at the second. Yet with a subtlety that can’t be pinpointed in one stand-alone phrase, Rebecka convinces the reader that she at once believes that the sun sleeps in Helen’s west-backing house and understands that it cannot be so. In such ways, Stephens shows great skill in negotiating Rebecka’s late grade-school age.

Song of the Orange Moons is not a perfect book; more cross-description between the characters, for example, would have been welcome, and because Stephens so clearly takes care in making each phrase matter, the few times she slips stand out. But one of the best compliments a reader can give a writer is to pay this kind of attention. We hear every word Rebecka, Helen, and Adelle are kind enough to give us.

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John Hawkes
Dalkey Archive ($13.95)

by Greg Gerke

Has there ever been a literary novel as saturated in sex and bodily fluids as John Hawkes’s The Passion Artist? Dalkey Archive’s recent reissue of this hypnotic work, first published in 1979, gives readers the chance to marvel at Hawkes’s unique blend of language and nightmares. The raw, unsettling, politically incorrect tones of the book make it a refreshing monument—a reminder of how daring, fevered, unapologetic writing can brand a reader’s consciousness, complete with a long sizzle of steam.

The Passion Artist is set in an unnamed Eastern European city ravaged by war and destruction: “in the single park the play equipment for children resembled a collection of devices for inflicting torture.” The city’s life revolves around its women’s prison, La Violaine, and the troubled main character, Konrad Vost—a man who thought “he was like some military personage striding with feigned complacency down a broad avenue awash with urine”—finds his mother is inside the prison, his wife is dead, and his teenage daughter is estranged. When a riot breaks out at the prison, he volunteers with other men to quash it, but they fail, resulting in Vost’s capture. It’s an apocalyptic novel more grimy and haywire than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where even dogs are monstrosities: “it carried an old spring-operated wooden clothespin sticking at a comic angle from its small toothless mouth. Something had misfired in the docking of the tail, which, curled briefly above the rump, was naked at the tip and revealed there a spot of wet pinkness very like the tiny anus that was always exposed.”

The novel’s title can be considered highly ironic. Throughout the book, as childhood memories of his mother killing his father and his punishment at an orphanage of sorts torment him, Vost is engaged by seductresses of all ages, including a teenage girl he pays for (“the girl’s face was buried in his disheveled groin. It was as if her head had become suddenly the head of a young lioness nuzzling at the wound it had made in the side of a tawny and still-warm fallen animal,”) and a women from the jail both during and after the revolt. Yet Vost is more the object of passion’s nemesis—inertia. All the women in his life and in society have turned against him, and some of the almost ritual scenes of sexual domination of Vost by each of these women—including a tall, red-haired femme fatale who accompanies his mother as they patrol the prison—produce a disjointedness as traditional masculinity is upended.

Aside from its transgressive content, The Passion Artist amply displays Hawkes’s trademark ornate, inventive prose—the aforementioned tall woman’s red hair is “so dark it resembled the meat of plums,” and a derelict landscape is colored with umbral tones: “the strong cold salty air was impossibly heavy with the smell of human excrement and of human bodies armed and booted and decomposing under the ferns, behind piles of rock, in the depths of wells.”

One can forget that Hawkes is simply describing air here, first imbuing it with three plain but solid adjectives before letting it trail an olfactory blanket that cinematically tracks backward so the sources of decomposition and death are highlighted. With Hawkes, things happen in such extreme slow motion, as so many colors and sensations of smell, taste, and touch appear, it is like seeing Monet’s painting of lilies while sitting by the actual lilies, feeling the sun that touched them and Monet and smelling the air they all breathed.

Certain novels showcase how writing can jab, fluster, and puncture—how fiction can be unafraid to put readers in precarious positions, where they have to scramble to survive the living nightmare of existence.The Passion Artist is undoubtedly one of these books, and it is a pleasure to have it restored to print.

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Frances O'Roark Dowell
Atheneum ($16.99)

by Carrie Mercer

“Quiet girls who weren't shy, girls who talked in riddles but were never actually rude”—such is the group of girls to which Isabelle Bean belongs. Isabelle makes the other middle school students roll their eyes, and the teachers throw up their hands. She's quirky. She doesn't exactly daydream, but instead tunes into some strange buzzing in the air that no one else hears. Put simply, Isabelle doesn't fit in, and she knows it. Imagine her delight, then, when she falls into an alternate universe.

In Falling In, Frances O'Roark Dowell has created a strong, interesting character who can take her place happily alongside Alice of Wonderland and Dorothy of Oz as an adventurer who escapes her dull existence. An avid reader of fairy tales and fantasy, Isabelle is ready for magic and elves and fairies. In a funny twist on Dorothy, Isabelle arrives in red boots she scrounged from a roadside junk pile, and instead of being heralded as a hero for killing a witch, she is greeted with horror, as a plain-looking girl shouts, “Run away, everyone! It's the witch, and she's come to eat us!”

Dowell has a wonderful sense of humor as she upsets Isabelle's expectations. Isabelle keeps thinking she must have some magical powers in this world, and is disappointed that she cannot summon the least sandwich or even an apple as she trudges through the forest alone and hungry. When Isabelle meets the real witch—“not the least bit scary, no evil fumes steaming off her skin, a house filled with sunlight and healing plants”—she is bewildered.

Isabelle prefers to think of herself as a changeling, a belief not uncommon in tweens. “If only you could go back to your real home, to your real family, everything would fall into place and you would be loved and admired all hours of the day”—or so you think, points out the narrator, directly addressing the reader. This technique, which Dowell uses throughout the book, has the effect of drawing the reader in closer, and making what's at stake feel important and real.

Things aren't falling into place at all for Isabelle, because Falling In is more than a fantasy; Dowell has deftly created a coming-of-age tale for tweens. Although Young Adult literature is a well-defined category for coming-of-age stories, we tend to forget there are earlier transitions.

To understand her new environment, Isabelle must look beyond the allegorical world of fairy tales, where characters are either good or evil, there is a clear moral, and everything is sorted in the end. In a subtle way, Dowell also addresses the disease of entitlement. For beyond having a more complex understanding, Isabelle must then choose whether or not to act. Even in an alternate universe, she learns life is not handed to you on a platter. You still have to get up off the couch, or toadstool, as it were, and do what you can do.

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Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col
Art by Andy Belanger
Idea and Design Works ($19.99)

by James R. Fleming

An entertaining mix of high-fantasy, Shakespearian pathos, comic book heroics, and postmodern literary tropes, Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare is among the most creative and interesting comic series being produced today. The central idea is built around two particular literary motifs: the hero’s quest and the placing of different classical characters within the same universe. Del Col and McCreery take an assortment of Shakespeare’s best-known, and even some of his less well-known, heroes and villains, and send them off on a mission to retrieve the magical quill of a reclusive wizard known as William Shakespeare.

The story opens shortly after Hamlet has been sent away from Denmark for killing Polonius. He winds up—after a series of less than fortunate events which will be familiar to even the most casual readers of the play—meeting Richard the Third; the king proposes that Hamlet, who appears to possess some sort of innate connection to the supernatural, find Shakespeare and his quill in return for having his father returned to life. Along the way Hamlet encounters and joins forces with a variety of Shakespeare’s great characters, including Falstaff, Puck, Juliet, and Othello. Richard the Third, Lady Macbeth, and Iago are also present throughout the series, conspiring in the background (and sometimes at the forefront) of the narrative to mysterious ends.

As anyone who studies or teaches Shakespeare will agree, revising and reinterpreting any aspect of the Bard’s work is a difficult task. It’s one thing, certainly, to know Shakespeare’s worlds and characters, and something else entirely to be able to recreate them. Shakespeare was, despite some contemporary critical sentiments to the contrary, an entirely original and unique creative force—a master of human psychology, storytelling, and the English language all at once. Yet it’s because the creators of Kill Shakespeare do not attempt to mirror Shakespeare exactly that the book works so well. Del Col and McCreery clearly know the canon and work well within the structural limitations imposed upon them by it; they do not overtly violate the key elements of any character’s psychology or attempt to transform any of those characters too drastically. That said, they also do not attempt to imitate Shakespeare’s language by having characters converse with each other in iambic pentameter. In many respects, this willingness to abide by Shakespeare’s structures without trying to imitate his sound is among the greatest strengths of the work. Del Col and McCreery borrow from Shakespeare—just as Shakespeare himself borrowed from a variety of sources—rather than merely imitate him, hence they create a work that pays tribute to his work while presenting an entirely original vision of his characters and stories.

The art, while often strong and striking, at times seems a bit too cartoony and animated for such an often dark and grisly story as this; a more realistic style of comic art would seem more appropriate for the tone and general style of this sort of story. Similarly, some of the more brutal scenes in the story, as well as the supernatural scenes, would have benefited from sharper and more forceful illustrations. That critique aside, the art is nevertheless lively and of high quality, and helps to bring the story even further to life for the reader. The actions scenes are especially visceral and engaging—Belanger has a real knack for choreographing fights—and each character is rendered distinctly, appearing just as one familiar with Shakespeare (and the countless popular adaptations of his plays) would imagine them to look.

Taken as a whole, Kill Shakespeare is a terrific book that will appeal to readers interested not only in Shakespeare, but also in literary experimentations, epic adventures, and high fantasy. While the series is not as sharp and clever as Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (a Victorian pastiche which subtly draws on the entire history of Western literature), Kill Shakespeare does recall that book’s sense of wonder, excitement, and both overt and subtle intertextuality. This volume collects only the first six issues of the series, which is still ongoing and slated to run for a total of twelve issues.

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Lauren Redniss
It Books ($29.99)

by John Bradley

Marie Curie would hate this book. Lauren Redniss, author ofCentury Girl, concedes as much in her epigraph to Radioactive: “With apologies to Marie Curie, who said, ‘There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.’” Certainly Curie had a right to her privacy, but to keep a subject’s private life sealed off is too much to ask of any biographer.

Is Radioactive a biography? Well, it does follow the major events in Marie Curie’s life (1859 – 1934)—her scientific breakthroughs, as well as her tumultuous love life, including a scandalous (at least in 1911) affair with a married man. The book also functions as a primer on the history of radioactivity, often leaping from the Curies to events such as the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. All this is told with the charm of a lushly and lavishly illustrated child’s book.

While this book will leave you pondering “love and fallout,” it will also make you ask that confounding question: What exactly is a book? What better time to contemplate this issue than now, when the New York Times has begun to include e-books in its bestseller list and when Borders has declared bankruptcy, in part due to the changing format of books. Lauren Redniss clearly loves books, though to her it’s a protean form we have yet to nail down. Print, for example, isn’t a block of prose for Redniss. The print in Radioactive changes in size, depending on the quantity of text the author needs to fit on a particular page. At other times, the space between the lines varies. And at other times, the layout resembles rock and roll posters of the ’60s and ’70s. On one page, for example, we see a hand clutch a test tube with the text rising from it like a pyramid-shaped cloud.

Part of the enjoyment of turning the pages of this book is that the reader never knows what to expect. In addition to her breathtaking drawings, Redniss incorporates the first X-ray ever made (of Wilhem Rontgen’s wife’s hand), typed pages from an F.B.I. file, an “atomic bomb damage status” map of Hiroshima, a photograph of drill assemblies used for underground nuclear tests, and a blindingly bright double-page drawing of an “ALL-HEXAHEDRAL ELEMENT COMPUTATIONAL MESH OF A SIMPLIFIED MODEL OF THE ADVANCED TEST REACTOR AT IDAHO NATIONAL LABORATORY.” She associatively weaves these images and more into the story of the Curies.

While Redniss clearly admires Marie Curie, the author doesn’t shy away from dealing with the consequences of the Curies’ discoveries. This 1903 quotation from Pierre Curie shows even he harbored fears about their work: “It could even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it.” Little did the Curies know that “non-criminal” use of radium would include the poisoning of watch dial painters, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nuclear reactor accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. To her credit, Redniss makes all of this part of the Curie story.

Given her balanced approach to the Curies and her skepticism of the miraculous claims made about the properties of radium, the book ends on a false note. We hear Steven Howe, a nuclear engineer, wax poetic about the use of nuclear technology that will allow us to have colonies on the moon with dwellings made of glass bricks. “The bricks [made of lunar dust] will stop the galactic cosmic radiation and let sunlight through. You’d have greenhouse capability. You could have glass cities and glass roads. A crystal city.” Given the seductive nature of power, especially nuclear power, what’s to stop someone stationed in this crystal city from deploying nuclear weaponry on an enemy satellite, or even on Earth? And what about the nuclear waste? Where and how will that be dealt with? Hasn’t Redniss showed us, over and over in these pages, the deadly results of radioactivity? Didn’t it even take the life of Marie Curie?

Perhaps Redniss could not help but succumb to the eerie spell of radium. Marie Curie is said to have kept some radium in her desk drawer and stared at its glow in the dark. Though she didn’t know the deadly results of such a practice at the time, would she have been able to resist had she known? Shouldn’t we know better now, even as we still talk about building “safer” nuclear reactors, and “storing” nuclear waste underground for thousands of years—and, yes, building nuclear-powered moon colonies? Could the “love and fallout” of Redniss’s subtitle refer to our irrational love of the atom?

Anyone interested in the Curies, the history of radium, and approaching science with a sense of wonder will treasure this mesmerizing book. Those who worry about the future of the book will be reassured byRadioactive—with its unique graphic approach and glow-in-the-dark cover, it seems a sure sign that the print and paper format will mutate, but endure.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Think seriously for a moment about how much culture you consume every day. This morning you likely started your day by choosing some clothing to wear, a pair of shoes, maybe some glasses—all of which have been meticulously designed by someone, somewhere. Perhaps as you were getting dressed, you tuned into your favorite music or TV station, or popped over to a social media platform to see what your friends were up to. As you sipped your first cup of coffee, maybe you surfed over to a favorite blog or web site, the content of which someone created, composed, wrote, edited, and produced before it was packaged for your screen by an army of graphic-, web-, brand-, and experience-designers. After your commute (by a bus, bike, car, train, or cab created by product designers), as you strolled down a typical urban street to the building where you work, you passed a mural or billboard, maybe a city park, each of which is the result of efforts by commercial artists, urban planners, architects, and landscape artists. Over the weekend, maybe you read that new literary magazine or book you read about online, or listened to a catchy music download; maybe you curled up with a favorite television show or video game, or took in a movie, concert, comedy show, play, or museum opening.

Just like the food we eat (and often with the food we eat), creative culture surrounds us—it is ubiquitous and, because of that, partially invisible. Whether we realize it or not, a thousand times a day we make choices about what kind of cultural products to consume; behind all of them individual artists and the complex economic systems that employ their services and talents—or don’t, as the case may be.

Thanks to the beleaguered economic climate in the United States, there is a new urgency surrounding the need for innovation, and a renewed interest in the importance of place. Communities and neighborhoods across the country share many of the same questions: How do we ensure both rural areas and cities in our area can thrive? What can we do to retain our region’s talent and distinctive color? How can our states better attract tourism? What can we do to encourage small business development and entrepreneurial spirit? How do we encourage cross-sector innovation and bring important attention to the causes we’re confident will make our neighborhoods stronger?

I work for a nonprofit organization in Minnesota, Springboard for the Arts, dedicated to these concerns, and we believe the answer to these questions is really quite simple: Support and invest in local artists. However, we also recognize the lack of adequate existing systems to support and effectively employ creative workers, or that might easily bring the fruits of those artists’ efforts to a larger public that could benefit from them. We need to act quickly to create ways for an arts-hungry populace to navigate these cultural corridors; we need to educate ourselves as consumers, and we need grassroots mechanisms that will connect us with the artists working in our communities.

There is a growing movement to do just that, which strives to connect people to the culture around them, and to do so at the source, by directly linking residents with local artists, and by cultivating an appreciation for regional varieties and specialties. For inspiration, we need to look no farther than what’s happening on small-scale, locally supported farms.

The first time I encountered a community supported agriculture (CSA) operation first-hand was at the wedding of two dear friends in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts in 2002. The couple had spent the summer interning on a small dairy farm, learning both the agricultural skills and business model and up to their elbows in manure and mud. The United States Department of Agriculture describes the CSA model as “a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.” Community members invest in the CSA, partaking of both the bounty and the risks of production, through the purchase of seasonal “shares” in the farm.

At the time, it seemed impossibly idyllic to me, all purple mountains’ majesty and purple carrots, the pride of hard work, and a singular, even nostalgic vision of the family farmer. I remember remarking to the bride, “CSAs seem like such a good idea, but I just can’t imagine them taking off as a mainstream idea.”

She glared at me, like I’d just uttered fighting words. “The hell they won’t.”

Years later, it’s now clear that community supported agriculture has not only proven to be a viable economic model for agricultural producers, but a bona fide social movement, as consumers increasingly invest, psychologically and financially, in “buying local.” In Minnesota alone, we have more than sixty independent agricultural CSAs. Minneapolis and Saint Paul also boast fourteen local and natural food co-operatives that collectively serve thousands of households. Next year, Minneapolis plans to revise the city’s zoning rules to accommodate urban agriculture, as the demand for local food production still outpaces the supply.

We at Springboard for the Arts, along with our colleagues at mnartists.org, noticed the rapid growth in the local food movement, and we couldn’t help but wonder: Why couldn’t we tap some of this “buy local” enthusiasm on behalf of local artists and cultural workers? Surely selecting the cultural products we consume every day is as deeply personal and distinct as the food we choose to prepare and eat with our families. But would arts patrons prove willing to buy into the benefits and risks inherent in the artistic process?

To test the idea, last year our two organizations partnered to create a community supported art program to support our area’s art and artists and to identify a group of patrons interested in investing in local creativity. For the project, we selected nine artists, each of whom received a $1000 commission to create fifty “shares” of artwork. For $300, our CSA shareholders took home “farm boxes” packed with locally produced artwork over the course of three different CSA events in as many months. Featured art works in the box that first CSA season included pieces like an edition of vinyl 7” records, a run of screen-prints, a series of small, handmade tea cups, a run of limited-edition photographs, letterpress editions of a poem or short story, and small original paintings.

The pick-up evenings were informal parties, meet-and-greets held at local food restaurants or art events, and these festive gatherings proved to be key opportunities for the artists and consumers to establish ongoing relationships with one another.

We have been stunned by the robust public demand for a program like this. When we announced the first season of the CSA to the public, all fifty available “shares” sold out in less than eight hours; we quickly filled a waiting list with 150 additional households who wanted to participate in the future. Clearly, there is an appetite for locally made art that is not being fed.

Just like independent farmers, artists have always struggled against the whims of their environments, harsh economic realities, and overwhelming competition from big business. As a result, individual artists tend to rely heavily on institutional support to make their work—through grants, fellowships, staff positions, contracts, and commissions. Usually, it’s only well-established artists who reap the benefits of a large community base of patrons and fans, and that’s something which can take years, decades, even a lifetime to build. Artists have fluctuating incomes and non-traditional career trajectories which, in turn, reinforce the commonly held notions that their work is rarefied, or that there’s an undue risk inherent in pursuing a creative career, or that success in an artistic field has more to do with magic than hard work.

As with the food we choose to eat, it is critical for consumers to understand where art and culture come from, to connect with the producers who make these cultural goods and services directly at the source. In order to begin to change buying behavior, we need to better understand the consequences of our consumption choices and to get to know the artists behind products we use and admire. To that end, we need access not only to artists’ products, but also to the labor and processes that allow them to create that work. By borrowing the community supported agriculture model completely and intact, it has been possible not only to adapt the economic benefits of such a scheme for artists’ sakes, but also to tap into a large audience which is already accustomed to buying directly from other kinds of local producers, and which already has a demonstrated interest in educated consumption and the power of intentional, conscious purchases.

The cultural CSA our organizations have tried in Minnesota is just one example of a burgeoning grassroots movement marked by new models of arts support that propose to change the economic paradigm for artists and cultural workers around the country. Crowd-sourced financing of creative projects is gaining momentum with artists and consumers alike, both through online platforms and through community-based programming. Websites like IndieAGoGo.com and Kickstarter.com allow producers to create project campaign pages and to connect with financial supporters online, brilliantly blending consumer enthusiasm for social media and micro-lending. Etsy.com has created a virtual marketplace where makers of handmade goods can set up shop so that consumers can easily find them, based on the type of work made or location. The 3/50 project, launched in 2009, encourages consumer support of local, independently owned, bricks & mortar retail businesses by asking participants to make three purchases of $50 or more to stimulate their local economies.

Artist-led initiatives like INCUBATE (Institute for Community Understanding Between the Art and the Everday) Chicago run programs like Sunday Soup, a meal-centered community-based funding platform for artist projects. This model allows guests to buy both a meal and a ballot for $20: guests may then vote on artists’ projects over the course of an evening’s dinner, and selected artists go home at the end of the evening with a bag of cash donated by their neighbors and friends. Most such events grant between $250 and $1000 to individual artists’ projects.

And these meal-based, micro-grant programs are springing up in cities across the country: programs like FEAST (Funding Emerging Artists with Sustainable Tactics) in Brooklyn and Kitchen of Innovation in D.C. are part of a growing network of small, community-based, ad hoc giving groups in which anyone can participate, either as a grantee or as a arts patron. While the benefits to the artists are clear, these types of initiatives also respond to an as-yet unmet desire felt by arts-hungry communities, too: access. As with community supported agriculture, facilitating direct relationships between residents and local cultural producers invigorates the connection consumers have with the arts in their area, by building deeper understanding of the art work made there and with the practicing artists who live in their neighborhoods.

This is not just about finding more money for independent artists, although that is critically important. The real benefit of grassroots arts programs like these has to do with celebrating the industry, talent, and creativity inherent in each and every community. Culture is not just something that comes, pre-fab and mass-produced, from Hollywood or New York City. Art and artists are the soul of every town—sometimes, local culture gives visitors a reason to come, but even more often, it’s why people come back to stay. When you build consumers’ appetite for local art and the work they do, you improve artists’ lives, certainly, but you also get to the heart of what it means to love where you live.

Click here to visit mnartists.org and find out more about the CSA project!

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011