Matthea Harvey Graywolf Press ($25) by Renoir Gaither If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, Mattea Harvey’s fifth collection of poetry, combines photographs, silhouettes, sewn images, and poetry with startling originality and depth. Harvey conjures a portmanteau of dazzling wordplay where mermaids, puppet snobs, and glass girls frolic in dreamscapes at once strangely odd […]
Georges Perec Translated, introduced, annotated, edited and indexed by Philip Terry and David Bellos David R. Godine ($16.95) by Jeff Bursey To some readers, the title of this newly translated book by Georges Perec will bring to mind another with the same title, and in a prefatory note Perec acknowledges that earlier work while distinguishing […]
Soumitra Chatterjee Translated by Arunava Sinha Supernova ($6.50) by Graziano Krätli Soumitra Chatterjee was for Satyajit Ray what Marcello Mastroianni was for Federico Fellini, Jean-Pierre Léaud for François Truffaut, or even (though in a far less problematic way) Klaus Kinski for Werner Herzog—an early and fateful discovery meant to become a source of inspiration, an […]
Susan Sherman Wings Press ($16) by Jim Feast While Susan Sherman’s book of stories Nirvana on Ninth Street is certainly a refreshing and readable volume, a reader might object to it on grounds of truth in advertising. The back cover copy describes the book as a kind of tell-all about Sherman’s neighborhood. Demetria Martínez blurbs […]
John Carr Walker SunnyOutside ($13) by Beth Taylor In this first collection of short stories, John Carr Walker studies the psyches and stumbles of men in the rural west as they try hard to negotiate the mysteries of others and themselves. Whether it’s in a vineyard, the woods, or a hand-built house, his men respond […]
Lydia Davis Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26) by Brooke Horvath With the 122 stories comprising Can’t and Won’t averaging two-and-a-half pages each, Lydia Davis can make István Örkény, the Hungarian writer famous for his “one-minute stories,” seem downright verbose. Readers familiar with Davis’s previous work will notice few changes here of style or sensibility, though […]
An Aladdin’s Cave of Delights by Lydia Wilson A Canon? The New York Review of Books has an authority which gives a children’s book published by its imprint the instant stamp of a classic; this effect is emphasized by their red cloth spines which line up beautifully on a shelf to unite the variety of […]
by James Naiden She lived for just over sixty-three years (1912-1975), her last three decades as an active writer who published fifteen books in her lifetime, one posthumously. Born Dorothy Betty Coles on July 3, 1912 in the provincial city of Reading, she did not attend college or university. Her poor “Maths” skills in what […]
INTERVIEWS Bald New World: An Interview with Peter Tieryas Liu Interviewed by Berit Ellingsen In a dystopian future where everyone is bald, two filmmaker friends go on a quest to “explore the existential angst of their balding world through cinema.” Looking for the Big Doom: An Interview with Trevor D. Richardson Interviewed by Simon Wilbanks […]
Editor’s Note: Leslie S. Klinger and Neil Gaiman appeared at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis on November 9, 2014, to discuss Klinger’s latest book, The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (Liveright, $39.95). Klinger, also the author of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and The New Annotated Dracula, has also edited three volumes to date […]