Chris Matthews Simon & Schuster ($28.99) by Mike Dillon “Doom,” poet Robert Lowell wrote of Robert Kennedy, “was woven into your nerves.” On June 5, 1968, the junior senator from New York, after winning the California Democratic primary, was gunned down in a crowded kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Chaos surrounded […]
Paul M. Sammon Dey Street Books ($16.99) by Ryder W. Miller Blade Runner, though not a cinematic blockbuster, ranks up there at with the very best of science fiction films. Credited with revolutionizing science fiction filmmaking and heavily influencing the cyberpunk subgenre, the film presents a post-nuclear world in a state of anarchy, a dystopian […]
Interviewed by Allan Vorda and Shawn Vorda One of the most popular and widely read cognitive scientists of our era, Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, where he conducts research on cognition, language, and social relations. Pinker received his B.A. in psychology from McGill University in 1976 and his […]
Stephen Mumford Bloomsbury Academic ($14.95) by Scott F. Parker Writer and philosopher Stephen Mumford takes Descartes for his model in Glimpse of Light: New Meditations on First Philosophy, and readers for whom Meditations on First Philosophy is more than just assigned reading in college will welcome Mumford’s “new meditations,” which offer another inspiring run at […]
Madame Nielsen Translated by Gaye Kynoch Open Letter ($14.95) by Richard Henry Danish artist Madame Nielsen is best known for her multiplicity. After declaring the death of her birth-identity in 2001, she produced work under multiple names (Anders Claudius West, Peter Hansen, etc.) before arriving at “Madame Nielsen,” an evolution accompanied by a switch from […]
Black and Blur consent not to be a single being Fred Moten Duke University Press ($27.95) Epistrophies Jazz and the Literary Imagination Brent Hayes Edwards Harvard University Press ($35) by Patrick James Dunagan In a recent interview in The Brooklyn Rail, poet Fred Moten says this when describing the “blur” resisting “individuation” of an artwork: […]
Lisa Olstein Copper Canyon Press ($16) by Denyse Kirsch In Late Empire, Lisa Olstein’s fourth poetry collection, the poet throws herself into a disturbing discussion about 21st-century realities, pinpointing, questioning, and exhorting. It’s a riveting picture of the micro, day-to-day busy-ness against the macro, overshadowing struggle of existential survival. “We bring the world to bed […]
Interviewed by Rob Couteau Danny Goldberg has been passionately involved in the music business ever since the late 1960s. At the age of nineteen, he reviewed the Woodstock Festival for Billboard and later wrote for publications such as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. In 1980 he co-produced and co-directed No Nukes, a film documenting […]
Edited by Steven Huff Tiger Bark Press ($16.95) by Cindra Halm From the beginning, Bill Knott and his poems survived his life and his death. When a young Midwestern poet calling himself Saint Geraud (1940-1966) (a "virgin and a suicide," as described on the book jacket) came onto the scene in the mid-1960s, the literary […]
Our Life Grows Ryszard Krynicki Translated by Alissa Valles New York Review Books ($14.95) Magnetic Point: Selected Poems 1968-2014 Ryszard Krynicki Translated by Clare Cavanagh New Directions ($18.95) by John Bradley Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski. To the list of great Polish modern poets, another name must be added: Ryszard […]