Dubravka Ugresic translated by David Williams Open Letter ($15.95) by Steve Street Considering the scope of references in this twelfth book and fifth collection of essays, the originally Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic might well have come across Kurt Vonnegut’s dictum that a writer must above all be a good date—i.e. good company for a reader. […]

Andrzej Stasiuk translated by Michael Kandel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($23) by Amy Henry Small countries should be allowed to cut history class. They should be like islands off to the side of the main current of progress. Driving out of Poland, Andrzej Stasiuk is again ready to explore the remote and often mysterious villages of […]

Inga Muscio Seven Stories Press ($17.95) by Amy Wright I donʼt often go in for political agendas, but “in” is precisely where one must go, according to Inga Muscio, to source the wellsprings of violence and to find the courage for empathy. The title of her new book, Rose: Love in Violent Times, echoes the title of […]

Ryan Van Meter Sarabande Books ($15.95) by Nasir Sakandar Growing up in the vast and quiet space of the Midwest, Ryan Van Meter kept his homosexuality a secret from his friends and family, and for a while from himself. It is not hard to imagine why he would keep such a secret. It was only […]

Jerry Yang with Mark Tabb Medallion Press ($24.95) by Adam Stemple There will be no spoiler alerts in this review; Jerry Yang won the Main Event at the 2007 World Series of Poker. About half of his memoir All In is taken up with this competition, where in pedestrian prose, Yang and co-author Mark Tabb tell the […]

James Attlee The University of Chicago Press ($26) by Paula Cisewski The moon is sort of a cliché, right? Even contemporary poets tend to avoid it. But say, for instance, I become lost one night, does the moon suddenly become more relevant? Or can’t I simply use my smartphone as a flashlight until I stumble […]

Blake Butler Harper Perennial ($14.99) by Nick Ripatrazone Insomnia has long been fodder for poets: Sylvia Plath, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Bishop, Walt Whitman, and others chronicled the debilitating struggle with sleep. Blake Butler’s first book of non-fiction, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, shifts that most poetic trouble to prose, and the transition brings new complications […]

Adam Kirsch Yale University Press ($24) by Spencer Dew Last January in a New York Times Book Review special issue on the present and future of criticism, Adam Kirsch wrote, “Increasingly, I feel that argument is only the form of criticism, not the substance, just as passing judgment on a particular book is only the occasion of […]

Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister The University of Alabama Press ($35) by Scott Newton The titular conceit of Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister’s new course-correction for video game criticism is equal parts “fun and brimstone”: Gaming Matters is a playful exploration of the allegedly boring, manipulative, duplicitous, and labor-intensive elements of an “alchemical” […]

Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli Duke University Press ($25.95) by Allie Curry Cutting Across Media begins by assuming a broader and necessarily more interdisciplinary debate about appropriation and copyright. For all their sweeping implicating, copyright reform activists Siva Viadhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs), Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture), and Kembrew McLeod (Freedom of Expression) need the range of […]