Patrick Pritchett Spuyten Duyvil ($16) by Norman Finkelstein In the End Notes of his audacious new volume of poems, Patrick Pritchett anticipates the question his readers are bound to ask: “What is a gnostic frequency?” Is it “the strange language in the middle of the way, on route, that speaks from the other side of […]
Lal Děd translated by Ranjit Hoskote Penguin India ($48) by Graziano Krätli One of the most interesting aspects of contemporary Indian poetry in English is the ways in which—and the extent to which—it has used this imported, imposed, and sovereignly appropriated language to revisit religious, philosophical, and literary works from its own rich and multilingual […]
Meghan O’Rourke W.W. Norton and Company ($24.95) by Mark Liebenow Meghan O’Rourke’s new poetry collection, Once, depicts grief’s landscape—the devastation, numbness, and moments of clarity. The intensity and open layout of poetry meshes with the episodic nature of coping with loss, and her direct tone is similar to the down-to-earth poems of the eighth-century Tang Dynasty, […]
Denise Low Woodley Memorial Press ($12) by Heath Fisher Former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low is a poet, editor, publisher, professor, and ghost hunter. Though this last fact may not be widely known outside Kansas—nor is it necessarily the opinion of the author herself—sufficient evidence exists inside the 126 pages of her latest offering,Ghost Stories […]
W. G. Sebald translated by Iain Galbraith Random House ($25) by Jesse Freedman In the years since his untimely death in 2001, the German author W. G. Sebald has amassed something of a cult following. Praised for incorporating into his fiction haunting images of the communities lost to Nazism, Sebald produced in his novels an […]
by Lance Olsen Editor’s Note: The following talk was given at the 2012 &Now Festival held at the Université de la Sorbonne in Paris June 6-10, 2012. Asked to speak this afternoon about Ben Marcus’s impossibility precincts, his words that become object complications on a page, his sentences that act as ontological metalepses reminding us […]
by Spencer Dew “I don’t know what it means that I spunked in the burqa,” Michael Muhammad Knight writes in his novel The Taqwacores, a text that, originally self-published in 2003, circulated “underground,” helping to transform the very Islamic punk scene it describes. The climactic scene of this novel involves an Islamic “punk rocker with a Zionist […]
Commemorating the 51st Anniversary of the Grove Press Edition of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, with a Special Tribute to Barney Rosset by Rob Couteau A world without hope, but no despair. It’s as though I had been converted to a new religion. —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer In the politically correct university town where I currently […]
by David Moscovich Yuriy Tarnawsky is responsible for the complex syntactical literary candy behind Three Blondes and Death, the novel Meningitis, and Like Blood in Water, as well as numerous collections of poetry, books of fiction, and plays in his native Ukrainian. His most recent collection of fiction, called Short Tails (JEF Books/Civil Coping Mechanisms), is a vivid, dream-like sequence […]
An Interview with Faruk Ulay by Norman Lock Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1957, Faruk Ulay is a prolific multimedia author / graphic designer living in Pasadena, California today. After receiving a B.A. in Graphic Design in Istanbul, he attended The Goldsmiths’ College in London for postgraduate studies in Visual Communications. He moved to the […]