John Reed, Nathaniel Tarn, and many more...

INTERVIEWS

The Seven Beauties and Science Fiction: An Interview with Critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
Interviewed by Matthew Cheney
Professor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. is one of the most thoughtful and subtle academic critics of science fiction.

Poet and Polemicist: An Interview with Jerome Rothenberg
by Sarah Suzor
& Review of Poetics & Polemics and Poems for the Millennium Volume Three
by Harry Polkinhorn
Rothenberg discusses his journey from mimeograph to Internet, from 16 pages to 1600.

Skin and Ink: An Interview with Catherynne M. Valente
Interviewed by William Alexander
Poet-turned-fantasy-novelist inks an erotic story about Palimpsest, a city that knows what you’ve been doing.

Turning on Shakespeare: An Interview with John Reed
Interviewed by Finn Harvor
John Reed is a novelist whose work moves across genres and achieves artistic seriousness and play at the same time.

FEATURES

Enid Dame’s Householdry
Essay by Burt Kimmelman
The poetry of Enid Dame (1943-2003) has long been prized among feminists and those involved in Jewish cultural studies. Here’s why.

On The Road Regained
Essay by C. Natale Peditto
Jack Kerouac’s 120-foot typescript scroll of On the Road travels the world these days, much the object of adoration, as if it were a relic of the true cross—if not the cross itself.

Or to Begin Again
Ann Lauterbach
Ann Lauterbach’s latest collection ravishes in the geometrical, in geometry’s attempt to make sense of time. Reviewed by Michael D. Snediker

Second Violins
Edited by Marco Sonzogni
On the occasion of the 120th anniversary of Mansfield’s birth, Sonzogni invited seventeen leading New Zealand authors to produce new stories riffing off the beginning paragraphs of Mansfield’s short story fragments. Reviewed by Linda Lappin

REVIEWS: FICTION

Asta in the Wings
Jan Elizabeth Watson
This debut novel relates the remarkably imaginative and heartbreaking story of a seven-year-old girl. Reviewed by Jaspar Lepak

Walk the Blue Fields
Claire Keegan
A pervasive melancholy rips through the hearts and minds of the characters in this Irish author’s new collection of stories. Reviewed by Salvatore Ruggiero

The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekawitha
Diane Glancy
Glancy seeks to flesh out the complicated relationship between the European colonizers and the native peoples of North America in her latest work of historical fiction. Reviewed by Emy Farley

My Life at First Try
Mark Budman
This semi-autobiographical work of fiction straddles the space between the short-story cycle and the novel, with its essential unities of character and plot. Reviewed by Bob Sommer

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters
John Langan
Before you sit down to read this intense collection of horror stories, lock your doors, check under the bed, and take a deep breath. Reviewed by Charlie Broderick

He Flies through the Air with the Greatest of Ease: A William Saroyan Reader
Edited by William E. Justice
For Saroyan, art was an escape from death, and this new Reader may once again grant him another spate of immortality. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller

We Agreed to Meet Just Here
Scott Blackwood
Winner of the 2007 AWP Award Series in the Novel, Scott Blackwood’s first novel tells the story of a small Texas town and the mystery of the lives that intersect there. Reviewed by Jaspar Lepak

Me and Kaminski
Daniel Kehlmann
An art journalist must tag along with a has-been artist, Kaminski, hoping to ride his fading coattails to his own modicum of success. Reviewed by Eric Iannelli

REVIEWS: NONFICTION

Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays
Eula Biss
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Biss’s essays explore and confront all the no man’s lands in our country. Reviewed by Scott F. Parker

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Werner Herzog
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story of making the film Fitzcarraldo is as insane as its plot. Reviewed by Scott Bryan Wilson

Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples
Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller
In her beautifully written apologia for Naples, Hazzard differentiates between merely traveling to another country and a stay of pilgrimage. Reviewed by Douglas Messerli

Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory
Edited by Gerald Nicosia
An assemblage of first-person narratives remembering the only daughter of Jack Kerouac. Reviewed by Mark Spitzer

The Yambo Ouologuem Reader: The Duty of Violence, A Black Ghostwriter's Letter to France, and The Thousand and One Bibles of Sex
Translated and edited by Christopher Wise
This Reader collects new translations of three of Ouologuem’s most controversial works, taking on the complicated myths and realities of African history. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton
A renowned literary theorist is tired of atheists rejecting Christianity as a whole rather than approaching it systematically. Reviewed by Emy Farley

The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles
Edited by Jeff Martin
Jeff Martin collects twenty-one retail worker perspectives that come down unnecessarily hard on consumers strolling in to conduct capitalist business-as-usual. Reviewed by Sarah Salter

On Moving: A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again
Louise DeSalvo
Through a close examination of an impressive array of writers and thinkers, DeSalvo explores the “emotional and physical consequences” of the human experience of relocation. Reviewed by Suzann Clemens

REVIEWS: POETRY

Prairie Style
C. S. Giscombe
The final book in a four-part series, Prairie Style continues Giscombe’s nomadic exploration into place. Reviewed by Paula Koneazny

Language For a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond
Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar
Six years in the making, this expansive and impressive anthology brings together over four hundred poets from over sixty countries writing in over forty different languages—all translated into English. Reviewed by Craig Santos Perez

Coeur de Lion
Ariana Reines
Summarizing Coeur de Lion wouldn’t do this thoughtful book justice—it might sound too much like a soap opera for the hip intelligentsia. Reviewed by Megan Pugh

Mainline to the Heart and Other Poems
Clive Matson
Originally published in 1966, these poems illustrate the power of the imaginative terrain opened by the original Beats in the mid-1950s. Reviewed by Tim Hunt

Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania
Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta and Cristian Popescu
A wildly roving narrative sensibility and the ability to render surreal images with poignancy and humor is a shared distinction in the work of these three contemporary Romanian prose poets. Reviewed by Stephan Delbos

Poetry State Forest
Bernadette Mayer
Like rutted footpaths, the poems coiling through Mayer’s newest collection steer readers into the scrubby undergrowth. Reviewed by Todd Pederson

Ohio Violence
Alison Stine
The world of Ohio Violence is rife with grief, bewilderment, and longing, but there’s no lack of the immediate experience of living life in a physical body. Reviewed by Erin M. Bertram

Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers
Nathaniel Tarn
In these rhythmic and stirring poems, Tarn continues to explore nature and the ramifications of human neglect and destruction. Reviewed by John Herbert Cunningham

REVIEWS: DRAMA

An Oresteia
Anne Carson
Although the first sentence of the book is “Not my idea to do this,” Carson presents unique translations of three Greek tragedies. Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

REVIEWS: GRAPHIC NOVELS

Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!: Volume 1
Scott Morse
Replacing himself with an adorable cartoon tiger in his autobiographical graphic novel Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!, author/artist Scott Morse attempts to reconcile the responsibilities of adulthood with his own vivid and often distracting imagination. Reviewed by Adam Hall

Baloney: A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts
Pascal Blanchet
A tragic fable by a Quebecois cartoonist, Baloney reimagines the limitations of sequential art and creates a distinctive, media-bending experience. Reviewed by Donald Lemke