Veronika Simoniti
translated by Nada Grošelj, et al
Dalkey Archive ($17)

by Garin Cycholl

In Veronika Simoniti’s “On the Mainland,” the narrator goes to spread his late wife’s ashes. He starts with Provence as a destination, then settles on Tuscany—it’s closer. He crosses the border from Slovenia into Italy, the ashes in an urn “firmly wedged among the other stuff” on the front seat. But along the road, he passes an ocean liner biding its time in a slim canal. Rethinking the ashes’ destination, he takes the urn aboard and falls asleep, only to be awakened by a workman who invites the mourner to his home for coffee. When the man returns to his car, his wife’s ashes are gone.

Simoniti’s stories in this collection explore those moments when place slips beyond one’s imagination and into the limb; moments, often in the corners of a strange city, when one looks for a semblance of what’s real. In his great essay, “Mapping Home,” Aleksandar Hemon calls this a need for a “personal infrastructure” against the impact of dislocation. At points, one has to present the facade of a self in a world of dissolving borders and unknown place. When things resonate with “uncanniness or distance,” Simoniti’s tales similarly offer a new way into the uncertain and unbound geographies here.

Things have weight in the stories of Mere Chances—languages, walks along train platforms, and especially loss. Hearing the “homey clatter of plates” in an Italian city, a young Slovenian woman reflects, “This is exile.” Lifted out of Europe and set down by her family in Bolivia, a schoolgirl observes the weight that “the old world” still has on her grandmother’s memory. Her grandmother continues to live in that old world, ignoring the Bolivia that surrounds her; the granddaughter calls her grandmother’s adaptation “forgetting from the back.” Dislocation forces other adaptations in Simoniti’s stories. Do even the dead remember “other worlds?” Refiguring his identity, a man recalls his father’s development of a noiseless typewriter, not-so-noiselessly concluding: “I was not my father’s masterpiece.”

One thing that is lost in these stories is a coherent, bounded Europe. Simoniti’s characters move through unmapped and imagined Europes. They travel in a range of weighty glances, erased borders, and accidental substance. One attempts to sell the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal. Another, propelled by a terminal cancer diagnosis, heads for Portugal, “to peer through the cracks of Southern Europe’s most reclusive people.” These characters’ essential skill is an ability to “dissemble,” a capability to present all the marks of some identity that is expected, a semblance of a known or anticipated world even as that world is in the process of disintegrating. According to the narrator of “Portugal,” “This isn’t running away . . . it’s just something I need to do before I run away for real.”

The narrator in “On the Mainland” surmises, “It doesn’t matter where exactly you transform into new substances . . . abroad is a place that’s different.” He recrosses old boundaries, loaded with the weight of “losing” his partner twice, having “mislaid [her] for good.” He returns to his corner of Europe, his task on that odd (and very real) line between finished and incomplete. His conclusion, in Nada Grošelj’s wonderful translation: “Let me know, by the way, if there are any such words as home and abroad on the other side.”

---

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Tamim Al-Barghouti
translated by Radwa Ashour
Interlink Books ($15)

by Dustin Michael

The subject of walls dominates the political discourse of the moment. This has prompted some examination of their functionality, of the privilege of those they protect and the suffering of those they obstruct—and of “the wall” as a symbol of separation between nations and individuals. There has even been discussion of Israel’s border wall, much of which stands within the West Bank. This stretch of Israel-built barrier is routinely touted as an effective model by proponents of a U.S./Mexico wall, while the converse argument might best be summarized by Robert Frost, who famously wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Frost’s “Mending Wall” notwithstanding, the poet’s perspective is almost entirely absent from our current conversation. This is unfortunate, as the poet is capable of crystallizing the experience of separation and longing, and of presenting more succinctly and eloquently than the politician or the pundit. However, those who are interested in such a perspective will find it on full display in the collection In Jerusalem and Other Poems by Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti.

Al-Barghouti is a poet of the displaced. The ache of a homeland lost or walled-off rings out through his poems, beautifully translated here from the Arabic by Radwa Ashour and himself. Each of his poems’ speakers exists in a world of barriers both seen and unseen, and each one moves through its cordoned-off creation with an urgent awareness of the dangers and challenges waiting in the shadows of those walls: the government, the desert, depression, hunger, thirst. Al-Barghouti’s poems remain inward-looking and reflective even when they become bitterly sorrowful and reactionary. For example, “The State” compares the government and the oppressed to the hyena and the deer—the predator and its vastly more numerous prey. Were the oppressed to turn all at once, the poet posits, the oppressor would be crushed “bone and all.” This, he laments, rarely happens. “The deer do not fear the hyena much,” he writes, “they only doubt themselves.”

Hopelessness is always standing guard in these poems, but Al-Barghouti shows his readers secret paths to reassurance and comfort. His message is not one of futility and fragmentation, but of perseverance and acceptance. The lines, “God willed the brilliant incongruity / Which sees a person broken when they’re whole / Whole when they’re broken . . . / And most valiant when wounded,” from a poem titled “Joy,” reveal the poet’s rugged spirit and serve as a synecdoche of sorts—the drop of water in which the ocean of Al-Barghouti’s poems can be discerned.

Al-Barghouti’s voice arises from a specific place and historical moment—his poems primarily address the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine—but American readers will find resonances in his work, as well as warnings, as they consider the possibility of a wall on their own border, and the shadow such a wall might cast on another people, as well as on themselves.

---

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Alexandra Mattraw
The Cultural Society ($20)

by Andrew Joron

Sirens, whatever else they may be, are surely communications, soundings to alarm or to allure. The poems in Alexandra Mattraw’s recent collection small siren perform both functions at once, signaling that language—that great bridge between thoughts and things—has begun to sway dangerously yet beautifully, and that its structural stresses are approaching the “yield point” of the sublime.

A “yield point,” we are told in the book’s endnotes, is a term used in structural engineering. Mattraw deploys the term at key places in her text, quoting a nineteenth-century engineering manual: “The yield point refers to the load at which solid material that is being stretched begins to flow or change shape permanently.” It’s not hard to see how this term could apply to poetic making. Moreover, the quoted passage is reminiscent of another nineteenth-century writer’s take on the cultural effect of capitalism: “All that is solid melts into air.”

To us, living in the twenty-first century, the meltdowns of meaning instigated by capitalism’s acceleration of history have become second nature. Traditional practices, and the discourses that support them, are going extinct as rapidly as most animal species. Caught up as we are in the matrix of the media spectacle, we barely notice their disappearance. By now, we have accepted the ways that meaning, right before our eyes, can “flow or change shape permanently.” Thus, writing that represents an existence composed entirely of yield points defines a new brand of realism.

Nonetheless, it is resistance to fluidity that seems to challenge and inspire this poet. The book’s pages are veritable blueprints that take us “inside the construction.” With their frequent mention of “trusses” and “rituals” (the social equivalent of trusses), not to mention their conspicuous deployment of slash marks and colons as structural underpinnings, the poems seek to check and guide the overflows and failures of meaning inherent to poetic language. In a melting reality, the mirage of an enduring pattern emerges as an obscure object of desire. Here, flow and fracture lend themselves not to deconstruction, but instead become the building materials of a new “reconstruction.”

One poem’s title states “You must build a new bridge before demolishing an old one,” implying that meanings must continue to cross the divide (between subject and object, you and I) even while reconstruction takes place.

you collect trusses / always iron X’s climb horizontal

ladders / a crane made of triangles / blue jays confuse

with trees / rare silence

full of itself / river glass

cracks / effortless white tusks / in your error /

measure honest use / four cables hold

In the poem entitled “Truss Brudge,” it’s made clear that linguistic (re)constructions serve as key supports for human interaction. The primacy of the encounter between self and other—another recurring theme in this book—is rendered here in constructivist terms: “Two parts fastened so tight that overloaded, joints produce only direct tension. You, I, and the your between. . . . Truss members are pinned together or their plates are riveted.”

Throughout small siren, the poet at once questions and makes visible the verbal bracework of our relations to others: how even the most effervescent meaning is riveted to mind, how our grammars provide “sway bracing” against the vicissitudes of love and death. There is a cool objectivity, something of an engineer’s measuring gaze, in the poet’s assessments of whether, and how long, the language-bridge between I and thou can endure.

The ever-present threat of structural failure, a sense that life must be conducted within swaying constructions, imbues these lines with tense vibrancy. Suspension bridge as lyre: the poems are tightly strung, the notes plucked carefully by the player.

In the end, however, the cables cannot hold. Following a poem (“Reconstruction: Christchurch, New Zealand”) that describes buildings destroyed by an earthquake, the collection’s last four poems consist of words scattered across the page, as if in the aftermath of a collapse.

Yet, even in dispersal, words create fields of force (syntactic, semantic) between themselves. Such forcefields then provide a foundation for the reconstruction of a space of meaning. The final phrase of the book is cast in the conditional, as an opening of possibility:

a cry

that could have

room

To be free to move, any meaning must be smaller than its own space of possibility. A “cry that could have room,” therefore, must always be a small siren.

---

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Interviewed by Ben Shields

Evan Fallenberg, novelist, translator, and university lecturer, lives in two very different parts of Israel. He has one home in Tel Aviv at the intersection of Rothschild Boulevard and Sheinkin Street, the most central location possible in the country’s most metropolitan city. His other home is ninety minutes north in the old city of Akko, where he runs Arabesque, a boutique hotel and artist residency. When we spoke by video call, he was in Akko, his face illuminated by a warm light with an Ottoman era wall behind him.

Fallenberg’s neighborhood in Tel Aviv is synonymous with urban Jewish culture. He’s a stone’s throw away from Rega, the former location of Café Tamar, which was a left-wing and artistic hub of downtown Tel Aviv for over 70 years. In Akko, a city best known for its Crusader ruins, his neighbors are predominantly Arab. He is a professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, a town just outside of Tel Aviv, where he teaches creative writing workshops, translation seminars, and other humanities-based courses.

Our interview coincides with the publishing of The Parting Gift (Other Press, $23), his third novel, and we ventured into discussions about his craft in general, as well as his prolific work as a translator of Hebrew. The novel, told in the form of a long letter, is disturbing; the narrator has just arrived back to the United States from a long stay in Israel, initially to study at an ulpan (Hebrew immersion school). Since returning, he has been staying with Adam, a graduate school friend and recipient of the letter, for four months, though all that time Adam has known nothing of the narrator’s chapter in Israel. The narrator reveals that he met Uzi, a spice merchant in the north of the country with whom he rapidly developed a passionate, animalistic sexual affair. Uzi’s machismo intoxicates him when things are good; when they’re bad, it becomes mere male entitlement. Uzi, with his spice business, ex-wife, and children, became the narrator’s new universe; how he has come to leave that universe is the letter’s subject. Most remarkable about The Parting Gift is the way Fallenberg constructs in prose precisely what it feels like when someone close to you slowly unmasks himself as untrustworthy and paranoid.

---

BEN SHIELDS: Why do you write?

EVAN FALLENBERG: When I was in my mid-thirties, life felt oppressive and I was desperate for a creative outlet. I was trying to be an Orthodox Jew in that period of my life, and it didn't go very well. I was choking, and needed something creative. I've always been a person of language, and so creativity for me meant words, and that's how I became a writer. But this is the way my brain is wired: making up stories all the time. I'd been doing it without writing them; I was a liar as a kid. But my lies weren't hurtful—they weren't meant to trick people. I just wanted to see how much of a story I could tell and get away with.

BS: So you are very much a late bloomer.

EF: Fellow writers seem to have been writing since they were eight years old and wrote their first novel when they were eleven. Not me at all. I think that part of the reason I didn't write until my mid-thirties was because I never believed that I would write a novel at the level that I like to read. I was finally desperate enough to let myself try.

BS: Were you raised an Orthodox Jew?

EF: Not at all. It was something that I adopted for a period of my life when I was in my early twenties and looking for meaning, looking for connection to this thing called Judaism. I'm glad today that I had that period in my life because I learned something and I'm not afraid of it. I can walk into any Jewish community in any synagogue anywhere in the world and know what's going on. But the practice of Orthodox Judaism, all the rules and regulations, just didn't suit me.

BS: You raised your children Orthodox?

EF: My two sons are, like me, not religious today. Each one of us at a different period and independently of the others made this decision. My ex-wife is still religious. She was Orthodox from birth and she's very open minded, very liberal, but Orthodox, and we're all respectful of one another.

BS: What classes are you teaching at Bar-Ilan University?

EF: I've only ever done workshops before, but I offered to teach a brand new course that is absolutely killing me—and I'm loving it at the same time. The idea is to take texts from mythology, the Bible, Shakespeare, whatever, and see what different artists in different genres have done through the centuries. I’m trying to make it as connected to life here as possible, including taking my students (half of whom are Arab, half Jewish) to a production of Salome at the Israeli Opera. Last week I did a class on how the Bible has been used in the arts. It's insane, there's so much material.

BS: How has being a translator affected your writing?

EF: When my first book came out, there were a couple of reviewers who referred to my ‘unusual’ use of English. And I realized by their examples that other languages I speak, particularly Hebrew, were pushing through. I found that knowing Hebrew has enriched my English. Knowing any other language enhances your appreciation of your own language.

BS: When you're writing fiction, do you start extemporaneously with a fragment that you follow free associatively? Or do you work with an outline?

EF: I have been very lucky with all three of my published novels, and with the one that I'm working on now. I start writing with a complete story in mind, the whole narrative arc. Sometimes it even feels like it comes out of nowhere. I clearly remember waking up one morning when I was still working on my first novel: It wasn't from a dream, but I was kind of in that state between. I had this idea for a story—I jumped out of bed, wrote two pages of notes and said, I will come back to this when I’ve completed my first novel because I don't want to be one of those people who's got all these starts and never finishes anything. So I only came back to it a year and a half later, and it was the entire arc of what became my second novel. That has happened to me now basically four times. There are a lot of deviations, though, so I see it like a map—I know where I'm driving, but on the way if there's something interesting over there I may follow it.

BS: Part of what’s so gripping about your new book is the first person narration. Do you have early drafts of The Parting Gift in the third person?

EF: No, it was always always first. This narrator was so demanding—I mean, he wasn't having it any other way, it was clear. It was like he was saying: my voice or nothing, I'm not working with you if you don't let me tell the story the way I need to. Don't hate me, Ben, but I wrote the whole novel in ten days.

BS: Oh my god. Yet it took a year and a half to incubate?

EF: Yeah . . . I had these incredibly long days where I just never stopped typing. I wrote 4500 words a day for ten days, and I realized I had a draft of the whole novel, precisely the novel I’d wanted to write. It obviously has gone through revisions since then, but in my own personal writing history, it’s the book that's closest as published to its original form. I was cooking that novel for eighteen months much more than I’d realized. I did not know that that was going to happen—I don't expect I'll ever have a writing process like this again.

BS: Thrilling. Incredible. Now, I sort of think about making a character like acting. There are the two methods: Stella Adler’s which is all research based—if you're playing a Roman Emperor, you should go to the library and read about what it was really like to be Emperor Augustus—then there's the Lee Strasberg method, which is all about drawing from your own life. If you're playing a Roman Emperor and there's an emotional moment, think about when your dog died at age seven. For most of us, we operate somewhere on a spectrum between those two. With you, is it more drawing more from your own life, or more invention and research based?

EF: Even when I try to start with someone I know, as soon as I start writing I see them as that character. The more I work with them, the farther away from the real person they go. And then the trick of it, of course, is to spend as much time as you can with the characters. The main character in my second novel was a dancer and choreographer, and I had to learn a lot about his world. So I learned about how he would have studied dance in Poland in the 1920s. I learned about what his dance life would have been like in the Royal Danish Ballet at age fifteen. I had to learn about what it would have been like to create the Tel Aviv Ballet, which I made up, in the 1940s, when I have him coming to Israel, because the culture here at the time was anti-bourgeoisie. Ballet was such a bourgeoise art, and people did not embrace it in Israel.

So I needed all that background. Not being a dancer myself, I found a woman here, she’s a Danish-born ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher. So I went to interview her about ballet and Denmark. I asked her to give me a ballet lesson so that I could feel what he was feeling in his body. I wound up taking two years of ballet lessons with her. It was really fascinating to me. Once I started studying with her, I understood how this man would have walked through life. He carried his body in a way that the rest of us who are not dancers do not carry our bodies. And it shapes his personality in a certain way. I needed to do all of that so I could write this character faithfully. I felt I couldn't do him justice until I went to that deep level of knowing him. I had given him as a birthday the twenty-second of February 1922, which is all twos. I actually went to an astrologer about that date. I said, I want you to do a chart for a person born on this day, but this is a character I've made up. We had a fascinating conversation, it was amazing, but at the end she said to me, “You don't know him well enough yet.” And I said to myself, I know him, I have been working on him. I've done ballet lessons! I have done research! A couple months later, I was on a transatlantic flight. I wasn't thinking about the novel. And suddenly, I thought, whoa! He’s not gay! This character is straight. I had gotten him wrong. I had to completely rethink many things about the novel, and how the actions of the novel were transpiring. All of that for one character.

BS: I loved the research component of essays in college, especially history. But then when it came to writing the actual paper, it became too tempting to fabricate. In fact, one time I got a paper back that got a good mark. But at the end, the professor said, “a couple of things, though, I think you're just making up.”

EF: Nailed! And then you knew your future was in fiction and not in academia.

BS: The Parting Gift is epistolary. And I would think that from a craft point of view, the character of Adam, to whom the book-length letter is written, would be one of the most difficult parts of the writing. It’s sort of like a house of cards: how much to really say about him? How often should you remind the reader that this is addressed to Adam?

EF: I didn't have much trouble with Adam, he was so clear to me. My publisher, Judith Gurewich, is an extraordinary woman; and one of the things that she did with me was sit in her home for three days and we read aloud the entire novel. It was really amazing. She herself is a Lacanian psychoanalyst, so what she was bringing to the text was incredibly rich. We had a lot of conversations about Adam. I hadn't talked to anyone about Adam—before this, I had five readers who had looked at the manuscript, but nobody had ever really mentioned Adam, and I hadn't felt any need to think too much about him. Then she started questioning and I began to think more deeply about this Adam character. I did make some changes then, but I also fought for him as he was, I didn’t want to flesh him out too much. Because it's epistolary, you are stuck in the head of one person with an agenda; I couldn't go too far away from his perspective. But this did give me more of an opportunity to think about who Adam was, what his relationship was to the narrator.

BS: I think the book would lose half of its intrigue and quality without the Adam component. Are there epistolary novels that you love that inspired you to write this one?

EF: There are two that I had in mind. One was by Michael Frayn, a writer I love, his novel The Trick of It. Also, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis made a huge impression on me when I first read it in my twenties. Alexis is a young married man leaving his wife. And the novel is a letter to her explaining why he has to leave her. It's actually because he's a homosexual, but he can't say that word. It's always couched in beautiful language. I didn't set out to write an epistolary novel. But then it gave me a lot of license to write nasty things in the narrator’s voice. In letters, we’re manipulative, telling a story the way we want it to be. From my first book—people would say to me, “Your character isn't very lovable.” I seem not to write lovable characters at all, and that doesn't bother me.

BS: Does it not frighten you to create characters who are unlikable, especially in the first person?

EF: No, I really enjoy it. I think of myself as a pretty nice guy. But it seems to me that one of the great tragedies of humankind is that we're stuck in our own bodies and our own minds forever. With books, you get to live somebody else's life. If they're written well, then they feel real. And you get to experience what other people experience. I remember that Carson McCullers got in trouble with one of her later books because she wrote something about a character smelling their own farts and not being repulsed by them. People were aghast at this. And I think it's hilarious that she wrote a line that behind closed doors people might have thought, but nobody dared to say. I really love that. People actually have these thoughts. Why not talk about it?

---

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

INTERVIEWS

“A Certain Amount of Insanity”:
Tessa Hadley in conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld
Minnesota author Curtis Sittenfeld sat down with British author Tessa Hadley at a Rain Taxi event this past January. The two had a lively and informative conversation on many topics inspired by Hadley's newest novel, Late in the Day.
Interviewed by Curtis Sittenfeld

We Are All Witnesses For Each Other:
An Interview with Sean Thomas Dougherty
The soulfulness of Dougherty’s poems and his chosen subjects—people who frequent pool halls and karaoke bars, neighborhood kids, immigrants, miners, anyone struggling in some way to have a voice in America—mark his work as outside the mainstream.
Interviewed by William Stobb

Everyone is Guilty: An Interview with Rick Harsch
Master of Midwestern noir Rick Harsch describes his newest book, a novelistic oral history about a real crime: the kidnapping of a teenager in 1953 La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Interviewed by Anne Kniggendorf

Unloveable Characters: An Interview with Evan Fallenberg
Novelist, translator, and university lecturer Evan Fallenberg discusses his newest novel, his craft, and his work as a translator of Hebrew.
Interviewed by Ben Shields

MULTI GENRE REVIEWS

The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings
Edited by Mary Ann Caws
This slim volume gives us a glimpse of the international movement that revolutionized every art form. Reviewed by John Bradley

POETRY REVIEWS

The Popol Vuh
translated by Michael Bazzett
The Popol Vuh, literally the “book of the woven mat,” is equal parts creation tale, hero’s journey, and genealogy of the K’iche’, the indigenous people of Guatemala. Reviewed by Maximilian Heinegg

The Dream of Reason
Jenny George
In this debut volume, George is unafraid to take on contemporary monsters that terrorize and disrupt our world. Reviewed by Warren Woessner

Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems
Clemens Starck
Starck draws from a lifetime of manual labor, and display a seemingly effortless craftmanship. Reviewed by John Bradley

Light Reading
Stephan Delbos
Delbos, a Prague-based poet, lures the reader in with these “light” poems, building toward a more challenging climax. Reviewed by Kenneth J. Pruitt

Fruit Geode
Alicia Jo Rabins
The experiences of childbirth and early motherhood are simultaneously physical and metaphorical in Rabins’s new collection, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 2018. Reviewed by Anat Hinkis

small siren
Alexandra Mattraw
In small siren, poems sound the alarm that language—that great bridge between thoughts and things—has begun to sway dangerously yet beautifully. Reviewed by Andrew Joron

In Jerusalem and Other Poems
Tamim Al-Barghouti
Al-Barghouti is a poet of the displaced; the ache of a homeland lost or walled-off rings out through his poems, beautifully translated here from the Arabic. Reviewed by Dustin Michael

COMICS REVIEWS

Mort Cinder
Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia
Mort Cinder is the first volume in The Alberto Breccia Library, a projected series that will present the legendary Argentine comics artist’s work to English-speaking audiences. Reviewed by John Pistelli

FICTION REVIEWS

Empty Words
Mario Levrero
The first novel by this Uruguayan author to be translated into English, Empty Words follows the narrator’s attempts to improve his handwriting through daily exercises, an undertaking he hopes will improve his scattered life. Reviewed by Adrian Glass-Moore

Wild Milk
Sabrina Orah Mark
Surreal strangeness scuttles, mutters, and lactates across the pages of poet Mark’s newest collection Wild Milk. Reviewed by Rachel Hill

Two Reviews of Aviaries
Zuzana Brabcová
We provide two takes on Brabcová’s final novel: Seth Rogoff explores historical and political undertones, as the story is set in the aftermath of Czech President Václav Havel’s death, while Jeff Alford explores themes of interstitiality amid madcap surrealism, a psychological and generational tug of war between women trapped in a failing system.

The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland
Nicolai Houm
Norwegian novelist Nicolai Houm's first book to be translated into English is a character study of a woman struggling for her very existence. Reviewed by Rick Henry

The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories
Raymond Roussel
In these newly translated stories and fragments, Roussel’s treatment of tragic events such as shipwrecks and death by poisoned word create intellectual delight and endless wonder. Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

The Annotated Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Page by page, the editors (a crime novelist, a scholar, and a poet) help the reader understand and contextualize Raymond Chandler’s 1939 first novel and noir classic. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller

Mere Chances
Veronika Simoniti
Slovenian author Simoniti’s stories offer a new way into uncertain and unbound geographies. Reviewed by Garin Cycholl

The Washington Decree
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Originally published in 2006 in Denmark, Adler-Olsen’s newly translated political thriller is a prescient commentary on current American politics. Reviewed by Poul Houe

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics
Nazia Kazi
The central focus of Nazia Kazi’s new book is white supremacy and the state-sanctioned violence that both emerges from and supports it in America. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

Lessons from a Dark Time
Adam Hochschild
Hochschild shares the stories of gutsy and bold individuals from across the world who have taken a stand against authoritative governments, spoken out against social injustices and inequalities, and dared to demand change. Reviewed by M. Lock Swingen

A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings
Raoul Vaneigem
In the second edition of this seventeen-year-old book, philosopher Raoul Vaneigem expands his scope to cover virtual rights and misuse of technology. Reviewed by George Longenecker

Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros
Michael Chabon
Bookends collects a series of brief essays, introductions, afterwords, and liner notes about things Michael Chabon holds dear. Reviewed by Erin Lewenauer

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019