INTERVIEWS
Of Film and Smoke: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
Interview by Paul McRandle
The British writer and filmmaker talks about epic journeys, American Smoke, and escaping London with John Clare.
Tapping into a Rural Religion: an Interview with Nick McRae
Interview by Connor Bjotvedt
Poet McRae discusses his award-winning chapbook Mountain Redemption, which focuses on the role of tradition and the emergence of Christian religions in mountain towns.
FEATURES
Am I an African?
Nigerian poet Aderibigbe explores the question: Can blackness equate Africanness?
An essay by D.M. Aderibigbe
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Wilder’s autobiography is a fascinating study in memory, rationalization, novelization, and the re-fashioning of history, as well as literary marketability.
Essay by Wayne Scott
Two Books on The Beast
Reviewed by Spencer Dew
Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics by Marco Pasi
Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic by Tobias Churton
Two new books take a closer look at occult hero and gadfly Aleister Crowley—through the prism of his politics and his time in Weimar Berlin.
Sketches of AWP
Documentary drawings by Minneapolis artist Anita White of the riot of literary love that was AWP 2015
POETRY REVIEWS
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
Rankine has created a text that blends poetry, narrative, essay, and visual art, going even beyond the publisher’s “Poetry/Essays” label into something far more complex and moving: an American Lyric. Reviewed by J.G. McClure
Lupa and Lamb
Susan Hawthorne
Hawthorne is a master-weaver, and her sixth book of poetry takes strands of myth, history, and new inventions to make a strong fabric of sisterhood. Reviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson
Daughters of Your Century
Dan Thomas-Glass
The poems of Thomas-Glass’s first full-length collection concern ethics as magnified through the lens of fatherhood. Reviewed by Chris Martin
Post Subject: A Fable
Oliver de la Paz
This collection of epistolary prose poems offers intriguing glimpses of a fallen empire. Reviewed by John Bradley
Reckless Lovely
Martha Silano
Silano’s breathless collection begins with the Big Bang and goes on to explore a quirky metaphysics. Reviewed by Janet McCann
Seascape
Heimrad Bäcker
The spare letterpress cover of Seascape matches the sparse language of the multi-paged concrete poem inside. Reviewed by Rebecca Hart Olander
FICTION REVIEWS
The First Bad Man
Miranda July
The First Bad Man displays July’s strength and particular delicacy, echoing character qualities and themes that will be familiar to her fans. Reviewed by Erin Lewenauer
Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014
Alice Munro
In this magnificent collection of stories, one can freshly discover why Munro was awarded the Novel Prize in Literature in 2013. Reviewed by Keith Abbott
Bombyonder
Reb Livingston
Livingston reinvents fictional character and narrative pattern while embracing the perplexities of prevarication, the imaginative value of absurdity, and the delights of wild artifice. Reviewed by John Parras
The Book of Strange New Things
Michel Faber
Faber’s futuristic tale of a Christian missionary sent to a distant planet to preach is his third and, according to him, final novel. Reviewed by James Naiden
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
Eimear McBride
This debut novel begins with a jolt to the reader’s sense of language and reality. Reviewed by Alex Brubaker
Waldo & Magic, Inc.
Robert A. Heinlein
Two short novels exemplify Heinlein’s work as he ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction that followed the era of pulps. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller
NONFICTION REVIEWS
No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead
Peter Richardson
Richardson’s biography gives a broader cultural history of The Dead, who were influenced by many of the famous icons of the 1960s and were bohemians before the term “hippie” was widely accepted. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller
I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995-1996
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark
Between the mind games and authentic encounters in this collection of emails, the reader will find some potential for Acker’s words to transcend the grave. Reviewed by Spencer Dew
Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf
Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret
This complicated book, which takes its premise from Three Guineas, Woolf’s 1938 treatise on academia and the feminine, is a response to and an extension of the latter’s imperative: “Think we must.” Reviewed by Kelsey Irving Beson
Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”
Lena Dunham
Dunham’s memoir-in-essays displays a special kind of bravery as she splashes from one anecdote to the next. Reviewed by Erin Lewenauer
Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom
Elaine Scarry
Scarry’s trenchant new works suggests that since the dawn of the nuclear age, the U.S. has stumbled away from its democratic ideals. Reviewed by Robert M Keefe
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Naomi Klein
At the heart of Klein’s latest book is how economic lust and a broken political system have precipitated our planet's climate catastrophe. Reviewed by Eliza Murphy