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VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2, SUMMER 2023 (#110)

To purchase issue #110 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Judith Margolis and Philip Miller: Let Us Now Praise Emptiness  |  interviewed by Yael Samuel
Rebecca Goodman: Why Write About the Shoah Now?  |  interviewed by David Moscovich
Yxta Maya Murray: Art and Atrocity  |  interviewed by Will Corwin
Patrick Parr: Slice of Life  |  interviewed by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe

FEATURES

If and Only If: Imaginary books reviewed   |  by Scott F. Parker
The New Life  |  a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: Cover art by Judith Margolis

NONFICTION / ART REVIEWS 

Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin & Kenward Elmslie  |  Chip Livingston, ed.  |  by W. C. Bamberger
My Life as a Godard Movie  |  Joanna Walsh  |  by Joseph Houlihan
Hotel Splendide  |  Ludwig Bemelmans  |  by Phia Holland
Postscripts  |  John Barth  |  by Allan Vorda
A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe  |  Milan Kundera  |  by Steven G. Kellman
Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path from Small-Town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army  |  Rachael Hanel  |  by Joseph Houlihan
Saved: Objects of the Dead  |  Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman  |  by Tom Patterson

FICTION REVIEWS

An Autobiography of Skin  |  Lakiesha Carr  |  by Nick Hilbourn
Any Other City  |  Hazel Jane Plante  |  by Eleanor J. Bader
City of Blows  |  Tim Blake Nelson  |  by Chris Barsanti
Siblings  |  Brigitte Reimann  |  by Daniel Byronson
Mrs. S  |  K Patrick  |  by Linda Stack-Nelson
Tell Me I’m an Artist  |  Chelsea Martin  |  by Joseph Houlihan
The Loophole  |  Naz Kutub  |  by Nick Havey

POETRY REVIEWS

Early Works  |  Alice Notley
The Speak Angel Series  |  Alice Notley  |  by Patrick James Dunagan
A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts  |  Wang Yin  |  by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Spectacle  |  Lauren Goodwin Slaughter  |  by Havilah Barnett
in ghostly onehead  |  J. D. Nelson  |  by Zack Kopp
Paradise is Jagged  |  Ann Fisher-Wirth  |  by Jacob Butlett
Triptychs  |  Sandra Simonds  |  by Tiffany Troy
The Wine Cup  |  Richard Berengarten  |  by Michael Jennings
Lyon Street  |  Marc Zegans  |  by Lisa Francesca

COMICS REVIEWS

Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington |  Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot |  by Paul Buhle

To purchase issue #110 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

2023 Rain Taxi Events

ANGELA RODEL | MEGAN KELSO | RAJA SHEHADEH | RAIN TAXI 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY | TWIN CITIES INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE PASSPORT 2023

ANNE ENRIGHT

Saturday, September 13, 2023

On September 13, 2023, the Twin Cities-based literary organization Rain Taxi presented a virtual event with acclaimed Irish author Anne Enright as the kickoff to its annual Twin Cities Book Festival; Enright discussed her new novel, The Wren, The Wren (Norton), with celebrated American author Francine Prose. In this unique book launch for the U.S. publication of the novel, the two writers discussed how the book came to be, the role of poetry in it, the anti-Romantic stance of Irish women writers, and more. A replay of the event (with optional closed captions) is free to view at Rain Taxi’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/raintaxiinc.

ANGELA RODEL

Friday, July 28, 2023

Rain Taxi was delighted to present translator Angela Rodel for a pop-up literary salon in celebration of her receiving, with author Georgi Gospodinov, this year’s International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter — the first time a Bulgarian work of fiction has won this prestigious prize. Rodel (originally from Minnesota!) discussed her translation work and life in Sofia with Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer. The event took place in the home of Rain Taxi Board member Eric Ortiz.

MEGAN KELSO

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Acclaimed cartoonist Megan Kelso made her first visit to Minnesota to celebrate the publication of her new book, Who Will Make the Pancakes (Fantagraphics). Kelso gave a reading enhanced with audio and was then joined by local cartoonist and Uncivilized Books publisher Tom Kaczynski. The reading took place at Next Chapter Books in Saint Paul.

RAJA SHEHADEH

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Renowned Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh began his US tour for We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (Other Press) with a Rain Taxi sponsored event in the Twin Cities! Shehadeh read briefly from his book, gave a scintillating talk about its genesis, and then was in conversation with Joseph Farag, a professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Palestinian literature. This event was held at the East Side Freedom Library and co-sponsored by the Arab American culture organization Mizna. Thank you to all!  A video of the event (with optional closed captions) is free to view at Rain Taxi’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/raintaxiinc.

RAIN TAXI 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

On May 10, 2023, Rain Taxi held a belated 25th anniversary celebration at the newly restored Granada Theater in uptown Minneapolis, with musical performances, author readings, and fantastic food and drinks! Thank you to everyone who celebrated this milestone with us.

This event was co-sponsored by DISPATCH and the Granada Theater.

TWIN CITIES INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY PASSPORT 2023

April 24-29, 2023

Another successful Independent Bookstore Day is in the books! Thousands flocked their favorite indie bookstores with the Twin Cities Bookstore Passport in hand to celebrate.

This event was sponsored by Finishing Line Press, The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature, Graywolf Press, Professional Editors Network, The Book House in Dinkytown, Candlewick Press, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, Haymarket Books, Lerner Publishing Group, The Loft Literary Center, Milkweed Editions, Mizna, and the University of Minnesota Press.

How to Communicate

John Lee Clark
W. W. Norton & Company ($29.95)

by Stephanie Burt                          

If you’re a poet—and if you work hard and make attentive, patient discoveries—you can expand the range of what a poem can do by finding new forms, new sets of moves that your language can make. If you’ve had unusual experience—lived an unusual, lucky, or difficult life, say—you can expand the range of what a poem can show and say by building that experience into your poems. If there’s a group of people like you whose experience isn’t represented in poems—or if it’s not represented often, or particularly well—you can do important political work by representing it. And if you’ve got access to an unusual conjunction of languages, ways to use words and to make yourself understood—say, Thai and Croatian, or Spanish, Catalan, and Cantonese, or the special talk of the Parisian underworld—you might be able to expand the range of what poems can do by translating, adapting, or making truly new work in a target language using what you learned from your source.

John Lee Clark is all four kinds of poet at once. This first book of Clark’s own poems (he edited the anthology Deaf American Poetry, published by Gallaudet University Press in 2009) does not just reflect (whatever that means) his experience as a DeafBlind creator, moving in Deaf and DeafBlind cultures as well as in other literary circles. It also shows new forms, new ways to use English, as in Clark’s slateku, dependent on puns generated by the two-sided slate used in pre-electronic Braille. Clark’s work imports into English new kinds of intimacy, sarcasm, and communal defense, from American Sign Language and from the less common language Protactile, used (as the name implies) by DeafBlind people who communicate via touch.

These kinds of translation reflect Clark’s life in between languages. He considers how to frame his tactile, translated, uncommonly embodied and uncommonly mediated day-to-day so that people like me (nondisabled, non-Deaf) can dive in.  And I want to dive in. He’s writing at once for people like me and to bolster like-minded figures, and he’s funny, angry, inviting, tender, genuine: “I have been filmed and photographed for free,” he writes in a prose poem with pointers to John Clare. “It costs so much to smile…. I would that I were a dragonfly curled up between your finger and your thumb.”

That’s a Clark original. Here’s a sample translation, from the Protactile of Oscar Chacon: “At the base of your forearm, the lumberjack is surprised. Still standing! What’s going on? Rubbing chin.” And here are lines sliced from an elegy in monostichs for the DeafBlind creator Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739): “He made a calculating machine with strings and pins and called it Palpable Arithmetic…. Go on feel what it says.” This caustically titled volume also covers the near-dissolution of a marriage, Clark’s life as a son and a father, and his early education—it’s got range. It’s got centuries of history. It’s got portraits, too: the teacher “Mrs. Schultz,” for example, who tried and failed to understand “the Clark boy,” and “The Politician,” whose signed faux pas puts John F. Kennedy’s famous jelly-doughnut remark in the shade (I won’t spoil the joke: read the book).

Is it okay to say, of a DeafBlind writer, that his work sounds like nothing else? Because, to this hearing reader, it’s true. Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English—in print, to the ear, on the fingertip—can do. He’s got puns, euphonies, wordplays, cleverly arranged syllabics, as in those slateku: “Hollywood / Smoothly wraps / Hollywood / Soothingly warps.” And he’s also funny, sometimes exhausted, and more often exasperated in a way that you might recognize if anyone has ever called you “brave” for attempting to live your daily life: “Let go of my arm. I will not wait / until I’m the last person on the plane.” Or: “Can’t I pick my nose / without it being a miracle?”

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Independent Bookstore Day Passport 2021

how to participate | sponsors | literary prize packs

Once again, Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Literary Calendar is teaming up with great independent bookstores in the Twin Cities to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day by creating the 2021 Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport! Jam-packed with bookstore coupons and illustrations by local artist Kevin Cannon, the Passport is FREE to pick up, and a great way to celebrate the book purveyors that make our metro area so great.

This year, you can take a full week to get your Passport stamped at the stores you visit, keeping in mind your own safety precautions and those of the stores—and as always, each and every stamp activates a store coupon. Get it stamped at multiple stores for a greater level of discounts and entry into our prize drawings!

Read on to find out where to go and how
you can win prizes. Post photos of your bookstore journey to @RainTaxiReview with hashtags #bookstoreday and #bookstorepassport.
See you at the stores!

How to Participate

  1. Pick up a Passport! You can get one any time between April 18 and April 24 at any of these stores:
    Birchbark Books
    Boneshaker Books
    Chapter 2 Books
    Cream and Amber
    Daybreak Press Global Books
    Dreamhaven Books
    Excelsior Bay Books
    Lake Country Booksellers
    Magers & Quinn Booksellers

    Moon Palace Books
    Next Chapter Booksellers
    Once Upon a Crime
    Paperback Exchange
    Red Balloon Bookshop
    Subtext Books
    Valley Bookseller
    Wild Rumpus
    Winding Trail Books

    NOTE: These stores will be open during the Passport week in different ways: in-person browsing, appointment only, curbside or window pickup only, pop-up activities planned, etc. Don’t forget to check each store’s web link for their status before visiting them! No matter their particular method, they are happy to give you a Passport and a stamp!
  2. Visit any of those stores between April 18 and April 24, and ask a bookseller to stamp their page in your Passport. Of course, with a full week to collect stamps, we encourage you to take time to look for a book while you’re there—you never know what treasures you’ll find in a great independent bookstore!
  3. Each stamp activates that store’s coupon; just bring your Passport back on a later date to redeem the coupon.

AVID READERS: Collect 10 stamps and ask the 10th store to stamp a special square that activates ALL 23 store coupons—the ones listed above and these additional stores that are currently online-only:

Babycake’s Book Stack
Black Garnet Books
The Irreverent Bookworm
Milkweed Books
Storied Owl

BOOKSTORE FANATICS: Collect all 18 stamps by end of day on April 24, and you’ll be entered to win a literary prize pack, each chock full of new books and other great prizes from our sponsors! Just ask the 18th store to stamp your Prize Entry form in the Passport, and then follow the instructions on that page to enter. Winners randomly chosen, and one lucky winner from this group will win the grand prize, see details on that below!

Rain Taxi will notify the winners via e-mail and send your prizes within one week of Independent Bookstore Day. Thank you, and happy book hunting!

Passport Sponsors

Thank you to this year's sponsors for their generosity and support of independent bookstores in the Twin Cities — please take a minute to visit their websites by clicking the links below and learning about all they have to offer!


Literary Prize Packs

Don’t forget that those people who visit ALL the stamp-giving stores over the course of the week will be entered in a drawing to win a Literary Prize Pack full of these great items!


Grand Prize

Our Grand Prize winner will receive a set of books selected by each of the independent bookstores participating in this year's Passport—and a handwritten note from each one explaining why they chose it!

These are just some of the great items in the Grand Prize!

Each store is offering a book that they feel is representative of both their store and their community of readers, so collectively this is a one-of-a-kind prize that reflects the wide array of reading tastes that the bounty of independent bookstores in our community affords. Good luck to all you intrepid readers, and from all the booksellers in the Twin Cities and Rain Taxi, we thank you for your support!

Spring 2023

Check back as we add more features and reviews in the next months!

Interviews

Stop, Look, and Listen: An Interview with Rae Armantrout
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout talks about breaking “out of the evangelical cage” as well as the process of writing Finalists and topics from censorship to grandparenting. Interviewed by David Moscovich

Archival Woman: An Interview with Sarah Heady
In her new book Comfort, Sarah Heady offers a refreshing new history of American women and the world surrounding them; the result illuminates not only the past, but our own tremulous moment. Interviewed by Greg Bem

A Wild Vitality: An Interview with Jerome Sala
Poet Jerome Sala discusses satirizing the corporate content machine, his Chicago art and performance influences, looking for culture in the branding of everyday objects, and his new collection How Much. Interviewed by Jim Feast

Features

Three New Publishers' Self-Retrospectives
Anthologies like these have critical value because they portray what publishers think they have achieved — and thus how they wish to be remembered. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz

George Mackay Brown: An Appreciation
A virtuoso with words, the prolific Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist George Mackay Brown remains too little known in literary circles. Essay by Mike Dillon

Two New Translations of Max Jacob’s Poetry
These new translations of two of Max Jacob’s major collections should be recognized as welcome and essential. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan        

Poetry Reviews

Alive at the End of the World
Saeed Jones
Alive at the End of the World is the work of a maturing poet, and perhaps a transitional work: the already-accomplished Saeed Jones has moved from the subject of his boyhood to the volatile racist politics of the here and now, as well as his worries for the future. Reviewed by Walter Holland

psalmbook
Laura Walker
In her new book, Laura Walker manages to preserve a sense of prayer while also reshaping the psalm into something new—a significant literary achievement. Reviewed by John Bradley

How to Communicate
John Lee Clark
John Lee Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English can do. Reviewed by Stephanie Burt

Water Has Many Colors
Kiriti Sengupta
Illustrated by Rochishnu Sanyal
From epics to succinct one-liners, Kiriti Sengupta suits his poetic form to the subject, just as the titular folk idiom reminds us that water takes shape from the container in which it is held. Reviewed by Malashri Lal

Nonfiction Reviews

Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress
Ranae Lenor Hanson
Ranae Lenor Hanson offers a personal map against which readers might chart their own ways through the uneasy waters of the climate crisis. Reviewed by Elizabeth Bailey

Tuesdays in Jail: What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates
Tina Welling
These reflections on teaching by novelist Tina Welling, which include non-judgmental sketches of her incarcerated students, make for a beautifully written memoir. Reviewed by George Longenecker

I Need to Tell You
Cathryn Vogeley
In a memoir that details moving from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Cathryn Vogeley also offers an enlightening examination of secret adoptions.  Reviewed by Sandra Eliason

Fiction Reviews

The Last Days of Terranova
Manuel Rivas
Translated by Jacob Rogers
The Last Days of Terranova is like a bookstore: One is pleasantly overwhelmed by the many rich stories that sit near one another. Reviewed by John Kazanjian   

Because I Loved You
Donnaldson Brown
Because I Loved You presents an adult assessment of the limits of love alongside a potent acknowledgment of the power of shared history. Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Participation
Anna Moschovakis
As she does in her poetry, Anna Moschovakis effectively employs and interrogates language in her latest novel, Participation. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan

Multi-Genre Reviews

I Made An Accident
Kevin Sampsell
Just as collage allows one to reorder the universe, poetry uses language to forge or reconstitute personal connections that may have been lost or rendered remote. Reviewed by Christopher Luna

Young Adult Fiction Reviews

Blaine for the Win
Robbie Couch
As depictions of queer characters become increasingly nuanced in YA fiction, Blaine for the Win will garner readers’ votes. Reviewed by Nick Havey

RAJA SHEHADEH

presented by Rain Taxi and Mizna

Wednesday, May 17, 2023, 7:00pm
East Side Freedom Library
1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul

Free and open to the public! Books will be available for purchase.
Please note this is an in-person event only; virtual attendance is not available.
East Side Freedom Library requires masks to be worn in their building.

Two boundary-pushing Minnesota orgs, Rain Taxi and Mizna, are proud to team up to present an evening with renowned Palestinian writer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, who will discuss his new book We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. At this special event, the author will be in conversation with Joseph Farag, professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Palestinian Literature and Culture. We hope to see you there!

About the Book

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I is in part the story of Palestine’s ongoing fight against multiple foreign powers, but it also presents a poignant unraveling of a complex father-son relationship. Set against the backdrop of continuing political unrest, Raja Shehadeh describes his failure as a young man to recognize his father’s courage as an activist fighting for Palestinian sovereignty and his father’s inability to appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. Then in 1985, Aziz Shehadeh is murdered, and Raja undergoes a profound and irrevocable change. 

About the Author

Raja Shehadeh, winner of the prestigious Orwell Prize for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, is widely regarded as Palestine’s leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. In addition to this new work and Palestinian Walks, Shehadeh is the author of many acclaimed books, including Strangers in the House, Occupation Diaries, Where the Line Is Drawn, and Going Home, which won the Moore Prize in 2020. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Granta, among many other periodicals. Shehadeh lives in Ramallah in Palestine. 

About the Moderator

Joseph R. Farag is Assistant Professor of Modern Arab Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where his teaching and scholarship focus on the intersection of politics and modern Arab literary production. His first book, titled Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile (2017), addresses Palestinian short fiction in the wake of the Nakba of 1948; his current book project explores narratives of imprisonment and confinement in novels and memoirs from across the Arab world. Farag's scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature and Middle East Literatures.  

VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1, SPRING 2023 (#109)

To purchase issue #109 using Paypal, click here.

To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Christine Sneed: Please Be Advised  |  by Justin Courter
Zack Kopp: A Guide to Happiness, Aliens, False Spiritualism, Brain Drugs, and Punk  |  by Hillary Leftwich

ESSAYS

Grand Prix: A Memory of Russell Banks  |  by Madison Smartt Bell
James Weldon Johnson: The Poet-Bureaucrat  |  by Richard Kostelanetz

FEATURES

If and Only If  |  by Scott F. Parker
The New Life  |  a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: cover art by David Amdur

FICTION REVIEWS

Headless World or The Problem of Time  |  Ascher/Straus  |  by Alvin Lu
Ex-Members  |  Tobias Carroll  |  by Jesi Buell
The Beloved of the Dawn  |  Franz Fühmann  |  by Greg Bem
Revenge of the Scapegoat  |  Caren Beilin  |  by Zoe Berkovitz
It Falls Gently All Around  |  Ramona Reeves  |  by Nick Hilbourn
Brother Alive  |  Zain Khalid  |  by Brian Watson
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf  |  Tara Ison  |  by Eleanor J. Bader
No Excuses  |  Stephen L. Harris  |  by George Longenecker

NONFICTION / ART REVIEWS

The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968–69  |  by Chris Funkhouser
Under My Bed and Other Essays  |  Jody Keisner  |  by Sandra Hager Eliason
We’re Not OK: Black Faculty Experiences and Higher Education Strategies  |  Antija M. Allen and Justin T. Stewart, eds.  |  by George Longenecker
Groundglass  |  Kathryn Savage  |  by Evan Youngs
The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature  |  Josh Lambert  |  by Richard Kostelanetz
The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan  |  Anthony Scaduto  |  by Scott F. Parker
A Horse At Night: On Writing  |  Amina Cain  |  by Garin Cycholl
Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal  |  John Yau  |  by W. C. Bamberger

POETRY REVIEWS

[To] The Last [Be] Human  |  Jorie Graham  |  by Walter Holland
How To Communicate  |  John Lee Clark  |  by Stephanie Burt
O  |  Zeina Hashem Beck  |  by Tara Ballard
Summer  |  Johannes Göransson  |  by K. Blasco Solér
The Collected Poems  |  Marguerite Young  |  by Zachary Tanner
The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives  |  Linda LeGarde Grover  |  by Warren Woessner
Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists  |  Laynie Brown  |  by John Bradley
No Farther Than the End of the Street  |  Benjamin Niespodziany  |  by Justin Lacour
Damage  |  Mark Scroggins  |  by Joe Safdie

COMICS REVIEWS

Regarding the Matter of Oswald’s Body  |  Christopher Cantwell and Luca Casalanguida  |  by Chris Barsanti

To purchase issue #109 using Paypal, click here.

To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

DAVID AMDUR

MayDay Parade 3
Acrylic on panel, 18” wide x 14” tall

Even before the pandemic, our culture was beset with isolation and conflict. In reaction, I have chosen to use my art to reach out to my community by depicting people coming together through music, art, festivals and social justice actions.

This painting represents the MayDay Parade, a community celebration which was organized annually for 45 years in South Minneapolis  by the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. Each April (before the pandemic), the community was invited to create hand-built puppets and masks for the parade— some over 15 feet tall. On the first Sunday of May, more than 50,000 diverse participants and spectators filed the streets in this celebration of local culture. 

—David Amdur

Hollow

Matthew Cole Levine
Unsolicited Press ($18)

by Joseph Houlihan

Hollow, the new horror novel by Matthew Cole Levine, lives in the tenuous space between the safety of the hearth and the darkest parts of the Wisconsin woods, where the wind screams like a howl. It tells the story of a small town, Grange, where all is not well. When Ben, a punch-drunk cop from Milwaukee, encounters a woman sprinting through a clearing across a forest highway, he is brought into a mystery that spans a century and crosses between this life and the next.

Quick and smart. Hollow draws on the traditions of tough cop noir and American folk horror, thereby setting up a classic trope: There is something in the woods, and it preys on the innocent. The novel contains spooky descriptions of cursed places:

He was drifting over a barren terrain, an endless canyon with towering cliffs of red sand, its basin littered with jagged rocks and a narrow, bubbling river. The light here was different, specked with clouds of dust and ash, and the sun did not emit warmth.

And hardboiled action as well:

The second devastating swing of the bat came a moment later, plummeting into the pit of Ben’s stomach as he collapsed. His gut lunged upward into his throat. A flood of water washed over him, turning everything into a liquid blur.

Levine follows that simple dictum from Raymond Chandler—“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean”—to produce a genre novel with literary flair. As Ben interrogates small town characters (a shifty sheriff, a hotel clerk, the local minister) in a race against time, Levine does a great job of moving through other kinds of heartbreak: the disappointment of moving away from loved ones, the resentments that smother our lives of best intention, the suffering through grief and addiction.

One of the most compelling scenes involves an improbable small-town library. Amid a vast, uncatalogued archive of pioneer materials in the basement, Ben finds old diaries and geological surveys, revealing a horror hidden in plain sight. Levine nods towards the possibility of ancient horror and devils on unceded lands, giving the novel a tenor that’s tongue in cheek enough to be scary and fun at the same time.

Smart, sad, and genuinely scary—as well as lyrical and heartbreakingly familiar—Hollow will make for dangerous company on long nights in the Upper Midwest.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Telluria

Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Max Lawton
New York Review Books ($18.95)

by Garin Cycholl

They say that those who live by the nail will probably die by the nail—that is, unless the nail is made of tellurium, set by a member of a guild of highly skilled technicians, and driven into one’s skull in a ritual that identifies the exact fold of the brain where the sharp, rare metal can awaken insight. That insight is the rub of Max Lawton’s newly released translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 novel, Telluria. What rough consciousness is emerging along our frontlines and glowing screens? How do we rescale our existence along these spaces in more human terms? These questions establish Telluria’s time and terrain.

Sorokin’s novel is told in fifty chapters. It explores the speculative, post-holy war geography of a dismembered Europe, in which a range of post-Putin Russian states has emerged on a redrawn map. Among these states, a nostalgia-tinged (i.e., ultra-Stalinist) post-Soviet Republic has reopened, and Telluria itself has developed as a 21st-century narco-state that traffics in rare metal nails that promise sudden revelation. A Great Wall of Russia, “one final imperial illusion,” re-marks the territory.

In this world, enlightenment is a commodity attained by having a nail made from tellurium driven into one’s head by a “carpenter” who uses a clothy, computer-like tablet (translated by Lawton as a “smartypants”) to map the nail’s precise target. The nail releases one from ordinary consciousness, a process that devotees ecstatically describe as having “rent asunder the chains of Time . . . the white-eyed executioner of hopes and expectations.”

The beauty of Telluria rises from the jagged music of our own expectations of this future world. Sorokin’s fifty chapters are widely divergent in tone and focus; they disarrange our dispositions to time. As history roughly unfolds around her, a distraught mother laments, “It’s unbearable . . . insanity growing up all around us like a crust of ice.” The human imagination of time itself is stretched out across this cold reality in Sorokin’s writing. Telluria offers a glimpse through our own moment into a distinctly medieval world that continues to work itself out along a shredded map of city-states and capital-driven fiefdoms.  In doing so, the novel exposes busily disintegrating empires and their attendant exploitation, suffering, and flight.  Against that chaos though, Sorokin pushes his readers to cease looking for signs in everything but themselves.

In an interview about the novel published at The Untranslated, Lawton posits, “Sorokin seems to almost long for the kind of ‘return to human scale’ offered by a collapse into medievaldom…There’s a thread of nostalgia for the long-past that runs through much of Sorokin’s work, always deconstructing itself even as it looks back wistfully.” This “thread of nostalgia” is evident in the translation’s tone; Lawton playfully “sounds” the range of centuries and prose styles in Telluria, whose medieval world unfolds through language. The land is mapped by belief and a new feudalism drawn from the remains of modernity. Simple things call human beings back into presence. Nomadic poets sing to endless steppes and dildoes speak of “peckerish labor.” All these alternative presents exist at once in Telluria.

In what could be an addendum to Brecht’s Mother Courage, two dog-men discuss poetry and the disposition of rational animals while stewing a pot of battlefield corpses.  To eat or not to eat? One laments that “man is losing his nature.” They cannot eat without talk. In Beckett-like stasis, their conversation looks back on their journey as one plucks a bullet from his mouth. They dwell on skulls’ fragility. A tellurium nail boils up from the skull in the pot. One reflects, “Two metals met in the head of this warrior. . . . A sublime tragedy.” Anticipating the road ahead, they feast. One reminds the other, “You shall read your great poems to the Ocean!”

Does Telluria traffic in “hope”? Not really, but perhaps it deals in something equally essential in this historical moment. A military officer longs for psychic transport “back into the blessed and enlightened Middle Ages. The world returned to human scale.” How does one find that scale amidst battlefield corpses and humming smartphones? Maybe not through “hope,” though perhaps through its medieval cousin: a state of mind capable of fusing our present states of persistent dread and wonder. In provoking the reader to consider this possibility, Sorokin’s novel is a nail to the head.

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