Bill Callahan Drag City ($10) by Karl Krause Sandwiched between a surrealistic dog and a bronze boxer on trap rock, Bill Callahan’s Letters to Emma Bowlcut mails seventy-two messages to a distant lover with humor and elegance. One half of an apparently two-sided correspondence, Letters also portrays a writer of a unique sensibility, wry and gentle at once. The […]
Hans Fallada translated by Michael Hofmann Melville House ($16.95) by Malcolm Forbes A mysterious person is dropping mysterious postcards across the city. No case for the police, surely. But the city happens to be Berlin, the date 1940. This is no careless postman or serial litterer at work. The city’s custodians are the country’s rulers, and […]
Jeff Parker DZANC Books ($16.95) by Charles Dodd White Contemporary short stories of true weight have the ability to transform our view of the world we inhabit, as they can trigger a moment of clarity amid an increasing saturation of cultural noise. Jeff Parker's story collection, The Taste of Penny, succeeds brilliantly in this regard, exposing […]
Buddhadeva Bose translated by Arunava Sinha Archipelago Books ($15) by André Naffis-Sahely You can profit by memories—you can even steal them—but you can't extirpate them. And yet, for what constitutes such a rich part of our consciousness, we can't help but want to be rid of them. “What's the value of memory?” asks one of […]
Thomas McGuane Alfred A. Knopf ($26.95) by Steve Street "Into the shitcan with everything ironic for the fun of it,” thinks the anti-hero of Thomas McGuane’s 1973 novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, which was to American literature something like what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band was to popular music six years earlier, in maybe something of the […]
Daniël Robberechts translated by Paul Vincent Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95) by Laird Hunt That’s how his Avignon is. A collection of streets that proceed at the speed of a pedestrian in a hurry, of boulevards that glide past at the speed of a bus; a town that revolves like a turntable with the increasing or […]
Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($26) by Yevgeniya Traps In Nemesis, his thirty-first book, Philip Roth returns to the well-trod ground of the Weequahic section of Newark, the setting of his first published work and the childhood home of some of Roth’s best-known protagonists—and of Roth himself. And, because the novel’s key figure, phys. ed. teacher […]
Robert Walser translated by Susan Bernofsky New Directions ($24.95) by Brent Cunningham If someone lent you a time machine and asked you to go back a hundred years, make contact with an obscure writer, and provide them with instructions for how to become the perfect literary cult figure for the early 21st century, your best […]
Pier Paolo Pasolini edited by Jack Hirschman City Lights Books ($16.95) by Mark Gustafson Like many people, I first encountered Pier Paolo Pasolini through his film The Decameron. It was a memorable meeting. To a wide audience, Pasolini is known as a controversial filmmaker, but he was a “creative dynamo,” justifiably famous in Italy as a […]
by Spencer Dew While it is generally billed as a horror comic, the enduring series John Constantine, Hellblazer can more productively be read as a lengthy treatise on the terrors of the real. The most recent volume of collected issues bears this out; India takes our hero, the working-class Liverpool mage of the title, from Brixton to Mumbai, where […]