By Nancy Smith
Sidewalks landed on my desk during the usual end-of-semester rush. I had several essays due, a stack of papers to grade, and a research project to wrap up. And then summer came.
Review: Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli
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Review: Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
By Ho Lin
Whither the great modern Shanghai novel? Beijing has its writers of the moment with Ma Jian and Wang Shuo, who capture the ferocity and irony that infect China’s capital. Shanghai is a tougher nut to crack: gilded, slippery, more bustling than feral, hopscotching between East and West.
Review: Insel by Mina Loy
By Maureen Alsop
Modernism, the lost generation’s artistic fate, the avant-garde, surrealism: these are historically inseparable from Mina Loy’s writing career. To the hallmarks that denote these concepts, Insel is no exception. Melville House’s publication of Insel revisits this posthumously published novel and includes the addition of a previously unreleased ending.
Review: The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, edited by John R. Woznicki
By Patrick James Dunagan
Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 marks a clear demarcation point in any historical discussion of American poetry, deserving mention in the same breath with, say, Allen Ginsberg’s ’55 “Howl” debut at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.
Review: The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
By Karen An-hwei Lee
Who is Albertine? For a clandestine majority averse to reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, a young woman named Albertine may be lost, indeed. On the Carsonian continuum, however, The Albertine Workout considers this question in a lively style: who is she? Carson’s survey of Proust’s novel takes the shape of a marvelous serial poem—with nary a dull mention of the narrator’s ruminations over a cup of tea and madeleines—illuminating the finer details of Albertine’s character.
Review: Poems of Consummation by Vicente Aleixandre, translated by Stephen Kessler
By Art Beck
Despite being a 1977 Nobel Laureate, Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984) remains relatively sparsely translated into English. There are several small selections translated by Willis Barnstone, Stephen Kessler, and others, published in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but these appear mostly out of print.
Review: Winter Mythologies and Abbots, Rimbaud the Son by Pierre Michon
By Art Beck
Pierre Michon, born 1945, won the Prix France Culture award in 1984 for his first book, a memoir of sorts, Vies Minuscules. In 2008, an English version, under the title Small Lives, was published by Archipelago Books with partial sponsorship of the French Ministry of Culture. Its translators, Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, were awarded the prestigious French American Foundation translation prize in 2009.
Review: Hank Forest’s Party by Ascher/Straus
By Mary Burger
Hank Forest’s Party is the latest volume of a collaborative project, part novel, part memoir, part philosophy, written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and published under the name Ascher/Straus. The ongoing project Monica’s Chronicle, begun in the 1970s, is a narrative of the process of narration. Narrator Monica records experiences of everyday life in a neighborhood in Rockaway Park, Queens, and weaves her notes through reflections and reinterpretations about the connections between experience, memory, and writing.
Review: Mirror Gazing by Warren Motte
By Nancy Smith
Warren Motte has been collecting literary mirror scenes for the past twenty-five years—a remarkable, if somewhat curious, undertaking. Motte, a devoted reader who absorbs “a healthy mix of so-called ‘serious literature’ and so-called ‘popular literature,’ ” has kept 3×5 notecards within each book to record the author, title, and page of each encountered mirror scene. His fascinating new book, Mirror Gazing, is a lovely reflection on these many mirror scenes and the peculiar pursuit of collecting.
Review: Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle
By Emily May Anderson Trances of the Blast’s title and its epigraph from the Book of Revelation conjure apocalypse, the blast from which we can hardly expect to recover. The book seldom deals with literal blasts, however, instead focusing on small everyday explosions...
Review: The Strangers by Eugene Lim
By Paul Vangelisti
As poets may look for languages to think in, some fiction writers search out new contexts to subject to prose. Thus inciting the necessary friction between writing and the world one imagines.
Review: Tiff Dressen, Todd Melicker, and Joseph Noble
By Patrick James Dunagan Tiff Dressen, Todd Melicker, and Joseph Noble will read from their work on the following: Wednesday, March 26, 7pm Canessa Park Reading Series, Canessa Gallery 708 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, California The Canessa Park building is in...
Review: Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
By Heather Mackey
Short enough to be read in one sitting, Severina by Guatemalan master Rodrigo Rey Rosa lingers disproportionately long in the imagination.
Review: Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
By Ho Lin
“Suddenly the front door swung open, and in walked…” This incomplete sentence, which occurs a third of the way into Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s delightful Definitely Maybe, is a tease, a taunt, and a mission statement.
Review: Soul in Space by Noelle Kocot
By Emily May Anderson
The poems in Soul in Space, Noelle Kocot’s sixth collection, spark across its pages like synapses firing in the brain.
Review: The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal
By Ho Lin
The word “fuck” is deployed fast and furious by Filiberto García in Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy — easily hundreds of times — and given that Filiberto is a public dick whose Christian name also means “dick,” this all might seem excessive to certain discerning readers.
Review: Nothing by Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon
Review by Heather Mackey
Sometimes it’s hard to call a book “promising,” with all that the word connotes of amiability. Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon’s debut novel Nothing is as promising as a rattlesnake.
Review: Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin & Marissa Alexander
By Daniel Shank Cruz
As its subtitle indicates, Ewuare X. Osayande’s anthology Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin & Marissa Alexander attempts to make space for poetry within the fractious public discourse surrounding two recent examples of race-related legal injustice.
Review: Notes on the Mosquito by Xi Chuan
By Karen An-hwei Lee
If I could sing well enough — or play acoustic guitar, for that matter — I would sing Xi Chuan’s early lyric poems in a quiet studio with a swept parquet floor.
Review: Somewhere Near Defiance by Jeff Gundy
By Daniel Shank CruzIn Somewhere Near Defiance, his sixth full-length collection of poems, Jeff Gundy is at the top of his game. The book revisits Gundy’s usual catalog of subjects — small-town life in the Midwest, nature, Mennonites, being on the road, and so on —...
Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
By Diego BáezDonna Tartt has turned out a single novel every decade, starting with her bestselling debut, The Secret History (1992), a semi-autobiographical “murder mystery in reverse” about students at a small private school in Vermont. The Little Friend (2002)...
Review: It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris by Patricia Engel
Review by Caitlin Callaghan
“He just wanted to live his dream of dying in Paris.” So says one of the new housemates of Leticia “Lita” del Cielo on her first morning as a new tenant in the House of Stars, a run-down mansion on the Left Bank in which well-moneyed—or “green-blooded”—young women board year by year.
Review: The Poetry of Jack Spicer By Daniel Katz
By Patrick James Dunagan
I first encountered poems by Jack Spicer in Don Allen’s anthology New American Poetry, however, his work didn’t immediately strike my fancy at the time.
Review: This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell
By Nancy Smith
Only a few paragraphs into This Is Between Us, it becomes clear that this is an intimate portrait of a relationship. A narrator speaks, perhaps confesses, directly to his lover of five years, and we get to peek inside the everyday details of this romance.
Review: Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford
By Caitlin Callaghan
Early on in Jamie Ford’s new novel, Songs of Willow Frost, William Eng, the twelve year-old protagonist, is about to run away from Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage with his best friend, Charlotte.
Review: Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master
By Patrick James Dunagan Both prolific and diverse, Russell Atkins’ literary output crosses over traditional divisions of genre, style, and form. He has drafted musical scores for many of his literary works and theorized his original theory of practice in his essay "A...
Review: Lillie was a goddess, Lillie was a whore
By Daniel Shank Cruz Penelope Scambly Schott’s sixth full-length poetry collection, Lillie was a goddess, Lillie was a whore, examines prostitution throughout history. The title character appears in different manifestations throughout the book and is named after the...
Review: Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews and a Lecture 1991-2007
By Patrick James Dunagan
Will Alexander astounds. Prolific beyond any easily understandable degree, poems, plays, novels, philosophical tracts, and artwork endlessly pour forth from him—I even recently witnessed him play piano in a San Francisco performance with the Cloud Shepherd ensemble accompanied by jazz violinist India Cooke.