Maxim Loskutoff W. W. Norton & Company ($25.95) by George Longenecker Come West and See, Maxim Luskutoff’s first short story collection, offers a collage of motley characters, some of them survivalists, and many of whom have doubts about themselves and their relationships, despite a veneer of bravado. The setting is the American west, where several […]
Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It Yascha Mounk Harvard University Press ($29.95) by Spencer Dew “To save democracy,” Yascha Mounk writes, “we need . . . to unite citizens around a common conception of their nation; to give them real hope for their economic future; and to make them more […]
Interviewed by W.D. Clarke Jeff Bursey's recently reissued first novel, Verbatim (Verbivoracious Press, $16), is a wicked satire of political life that presents a "verbatim" record of the workings of a legislature in a fictional province in eastern Canada. In Bursey's nuanced rendering, the evil banality of politicians of all stripes is recorded for posterity […]
My Years with the Exasperating Genius Charlie Harmon Imagine ($24.99) by Douglas Messerli Charlie Harmon, the author of On the Road & Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein, worked as Bernstein’s personal assistant for four years late in Bernstein’s life, establishing a very close (if also, as the subtitle indicates, exasperating), relationship. As Harmon begins […]
Caroline Jester and Caridad Svich Edited by Caroline Jester Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama ($35.95) by Justin Maxwell In Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft, dramaturg Caroline Jester and playwright Caridad Svich offer a valuable and broad-ranging collection of interviews. Each playwright interviewed for the book was asked three simple questions that formed the basis of a longer conversation. […]
Interviewed by Eric Magrane Jared Stanley is a poet and artist whose most recent book is EARS (Nightboat, $15.95). Sam Lohmann, writing for The Volta, called EARS “a manifesto of interdependence and susceptibility, a theory of the senses, and a deliberate sequence of jokes about lyric address.” His forthcoming work includes a chapbook, Ignore the […]
Jorge Aulicino Translated by Judith Filc Tupelo Press ($16.95) by M. Lock Swingen A foreboding sense of violence and loss pervades A Certain Roughness in Their Syntax, a collection of poems by Jorge Aulicino, one of Argentina’s most celebrated and distinguished contemporary poets. Marked by the experience of growing up in Buenos Aires as a […]
Federico García Lorca Translated by Sarah Arvio Alfred A. Knopf ($35) by Patrick James Dunagan An enthusiastic, near universal adoration swathes the work of Federico García Lorca. Over the seventy-odd years since the tragedy of his assassination in 1936 by fascist troops of Spanish dictator Franco on charges of being socialist and homosexual, poetic attestations […]
Norman Finkelstein Dos Madres Press ($17) by Alexander Dickow The back cover of From the Files of the Immanent Foundation quotes from one of the poems, describing the book as a network of spies and secrets, an infinite arcanum of hierophants and fools, residing in a mansion of closets and trapdoors, stairways and hallways, nested […]
INTERVIEWS: Revisiting the Journey: An Interview with Craig Thompson In this transcript of a talk given at the 2018 Autoptic Festival in Minneapolis, Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer speaks with graphic novelist Craig Thompson about the reissue of his 2004 book Carnet de Voyage. Interviewed by Eric Lorberer Flights of Rhetoric: An Interview with Jeff […]