A Community Writing Itself: An Interview with Sarah Rosenthal
Interviewed by Craig Santos Perez
Sarah Rosenthal discusses A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area.

Remembering the Deluge: An Interview with Jeffrey H. Jackson
Interviewed by Rob Couteau
Jeffrey H. Jackson discusses Paris Under Water.

The Past in Fragments: An Interview with Julie Carr
Interviewed by Andrew Zawacki
Julie Carr’s unit of composition has tended toward the book, allowing her a wide, elastic format for thinking—and feeling—her way through an array of intertwined issues.

Out of My Own Way: An Interview with Edwin Torres
Interviewed by Ken L. Walker
Edwin Torres talks about some of his favorite poets, musical acts, designers, and the Slam movement.

The Author with the Unpronounceable Name: An Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi
Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Paolo Bacigalupi discusses The Windup Girl and Ship Breaker.

The Essayist/Poet as Hacker, Or, My Meander with Ander
Essay by Mark Gustafson
An in-depth look at how Ander Monson explores the high-velocity technological maelstrom of our culture.

mnartists.org Presents: Siah Armanjani
Essay by Ann Klefstad
A new feature presenting the exceptional work of Minnesota artists.

Aliss at the Fire
Jon Fosse
Norwegian writer Jon Fosse explores the pain of unrelenting grief in this slim novel. Reviewed by Alison Barker

Termite Parade
Joshua Mohr
In his newest novel, Mohr employs three rotating narrators who search for answers to the unanswerable. Reviewed by Adam Hall

Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes
Daniel Kehlmann
Kehlmann’s collection of stories constitutes a novel that creates a cohesive narrative without the benefit of a perceptible overarching protagonist. Reviewed by Salvatore Ruggiero

Antwerp
Roberto Bolaño
The fifty-six short chapters which compose Antwerp are crucial to an understanding of the Latin sensation, while at the same time finding the writer working in a unique mode. Reviewed by Joshua Willey

From Wǒnso Pond
Kang Kyǒng-ae
Kyǒng-ae delivers a portrait of the ordinary individuals whose lives are torn apart as they struggle to transition from a traditional, agricultural way of life to a modern industrial economy in contemporary South Korea. Reviewed by Sun Yung Shin

Elegy for a Fabulous World
Alta Ifland
Half memoir, half fantasy, Ifland's new collection of stories sprawls across two continents and a lifetime, tracing a cast of characters who are barely alive and objects that are barely inanimate. Reviewed by Matthew Thrasher

Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
For those who like their fiction burly and tough, and have an abiding fascination with the difficult, Franzen isn’t your man. Reviewed by Tim Jacobs

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell
Often compared to Tolstoy and Pynchon, Mitchell delivers a deeply-imagined historical novel set in Nagasaki, Japan from 1799 to 1817. Reviewed by Ed Taylor

The Patience Stone
Atiq Rahimi
The Afghan writer and filmmaker who fled Afghanistan in 1984 sets his fourth novel during the struggle for power that commenced upon the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. Reviewed by Brooke Horvath

2017
Olga Slavnikova
Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize-winning novel is set in the Riphean region, an imaginary mountainous area in Russia’s north, in the eponymous year, the centennial of the Russian Revolution. Reviewed by Yevgeniya Traps

REVIEWS: MIXED GENRE

The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart’s The Light Club of Batavia
Josiah McElheny
Originally published in German in 1912 and translated here for the first time, The Light Club concerns a group of rich eccentrics who hatch a plan to create a dazzling, light-saturated underground environment—a spa for “bathing in light”—in an abandoned mine. Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

REVIEWS: YA FICTION

Siren
Tricia Rayburn
Rayburn's first young adult novel offers a realistic story with just a smidgen of fantasy, playing with the suspension of disbelief every reader enters on reading a work of fiction. Reviewed by Carrie Mercer

REVIEWS: NONFICTION

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
Georges Perec
By observing the intricate “fabric” of one urban intersection, Perec creates a strikingly beautiful poem out of the everyday world. Reviewed by Kevin Carollo

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
Bill Clegg
In this memoir, Clegg recounts a prodigious attempt at self-destruction followed by his eventual recovery. Reviewed by Scott F. Parker

The Poetics of Trespass
Erik Anderson
Anderson's twofold project of walking and writing records his “attempt to inscribe language into a non-linguistic space.” Reviewed by Paula Koneazny

Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work
Edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery
This collection on the great poet marks the occasion of a conference held a year and a half after the poet’s death, where versions of these essays were first presented. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe
Peter Y. Paik
In this brilliant study, Paik suggests that, with environmental crises looming and our era of material abundance consequently imperiled, we may need to reintroduce some of the lessons of real conservatism into our attempts to better the world. Reviewed by John Pistelli

Chuck Close: Life
Christopher Finch
Authored by his longtime friend and colleague Christopher Finch, Chuck Close: Life attempts to grasp the magnitude and sheer force of the artist’s aesthetic and humanitarian reach, with mixed results. Reviewed by Mason Riddle

A Wall in Palestine
René Backmann
Backmann investigates a bit too objectively the contested “security barrier” dividing Israel from the West Bank. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction
Evan Brier
Brier resists the tantalizing, yet timeless, question: why don’t people read? Rather, he proffers a richer alternative: why, in a particular historical moment, do we perceive the state of reading to be in crisis? Reviewed by Matthew Thrasher

About a Mountain
John D’Agata
D'Agata's new collection of essays moves from investigative journalism into personal inquiries on fears, habits, and failures—and then morphs again. Reviewed by Cindra Halm

The Signature of All Things: On Method
Giorgio Agamben
This new book by the eminent philosopher is devoted to working through some of Michel Foucault’s key breakthroughs, en route to laying out Agamben’s own conceptions of method. Reviewed by Adrian Doerr

REVIEWS: POETRY

Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994 – 2005
Lissa Wolsak
In Wolsak’s poetry, we live and breathe and achieve awareness in a state of unknowing—a domain that is ethical, mystical, pedagogical, spiritual, and profoundly etymological. Reviewed by Hank Lazer

Mean Free Path
Ben Lerner
Lerner's new collection of poetry is shaped by the speaker’s hesitation and fixation on particular words or images, while the book’s concerns with absence and grief, writing and language-cum-politics emerge out of the white noise. Reviewed by Kristen Evans

The Apple Trees at Olema
Robert Hass
Hass has championed poetry through his own writing, his translations, and his stewardship as the U. S. Poet Laureate; this latest volume only confirms his mastery of the art form. Reviewed by James Naiden

Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Srečo Kosovel
Srečko Kosovel
Kosovel should be read for the cosmopolitan poetic he crafted in the midst of Italian annexation and the increasing pressures of Fascism. Reviewed by Amy Groshek

flare
Cole Swensen and Thomas Nozkowski
From the moment the reader takes flare off the shelf, she is asked to think about space and form—two elements Cole Swensen's poetry and Thomas Nozkowski's paintings challenge on both visual and linguistic registers. Reviewed by Kristen Evans

Like a Sea
Samuel Amadon
In his debut collection of poems, Amadon frequently melds disparate impressions into sentences that play with syntax and sense like kittens batting balls of yarn. Reviewed by James Reiss

REVIEWS: GRAPHIC NOVELS

The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen
Denis Kitchen
Although Kitchen is better known as the publisher of the legendary Kitchen Sink Press, this collection celebrates of the work of this unsung artist. Reviewed by Seth D. Lowry

Trickster: Native American Tales
edited by Matt Dembicki
This graphic anthology of Native American trickster tales is rendered by a talented crew of illustrators. Reviewed by Britt Aamodt

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010