New & Noteworthy Books

Cadillac Men

Poetry by Rebecca Schumejda

NYQ Books, October 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1935520689

Paperback: 156pp; $16.95

Rebecca Schumejda’s second full-length collection, Cadillac Men, explores the pool hall subculture before the economic downturn in 2008, when the narrator and her husband took a calculated risk and purchased a pool hall in downtown Kingston, New York. During their arduous planning, they did not consider that their livelihood would depend on men who threw pebbles in church collection plates and had nicknames like Bobby-Balls-in-Hand. Cadillac Men is a fractured poetic memoir about the year the narrator’s husband chased his lifelong dream by starting Crazy Eights, and the recessions that occurred as her family, the economy, her health and The Cadillac Men all took downward spirals.

Clangings

Poetry by Steven Cramer

Sarabande Books, October 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-936747-46-7

Paperback: 80pp; $14.95

Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings,” and Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words’ power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.

An End to All Things

Fiction by Jared Yates Sexton

Atticus Books, December 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0-9840405-1-3

Paperback: 224pp; $14.95

In these emotionally wrenching stories about the complexity of blue-collar lives in the post-9/11 world, debut author Jared Yates Sexton’s An End To All Things shifts the focus from politicians and businessmen to ground zero of the new American world: Main Street. Sexton is the managing editor of BULL and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Million Writer’s Award. An End To All Things was a finalist for the New American Fiction Prize.

Everything Begins & Ends
at the Kentucky Club

Fiction by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Cinco Puntos Press, November 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1935955320

Paperback: 180pp; $16.95

Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s stories reveal how all borders—real, imagined, sexual, human, the line between dark and light, addict and straight—entangle those who live on either side. Take, for instance, the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande. Sáenz knows that the Kentucky Club, like special watering holes in all cities, is the contrary to borders. It welcomes Spanish and English, Mexicans and gringos, poor and rich, gay and straight, drug addicts and drunks, laughter and sadness, and even despair. It’s a place of rich history and good drinks and cold beer and a long polished mahogany bar.

Sandalwood Death

Fiction by Mo Yan

Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt

University of Oklahoma Press, January 2013

ISBN-13: 978-0806143392

Paperback: 424pp; $24.95

Winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sandalwood Death is set during the Boxer Rebellion and centers on the interplay between its female protagonist, Sun Meiniang, and the three paternal figures in her life. One of these men is her biological father, Sun Bing, an opera virtuoso and a leader of the Boxer Rebellion. As the bitter events surrounding the revolt unfold, we watch Sun Bing march toward his cruel fate, the gruesome “sandalwood punishment.” The book’s starkly beautiful language is here masterfully rendered into English by renowned translator Howard Goldblatt.

So Recently Rent a World

New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012

Poetry by Andrei Codrescu

Coffee House Press, December 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1566893008

Paperback: 352pp; $22.00

Raconteur, poet, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu delivers in his inimitable, irreverent style a collection that traverses subjects from aging to consumerism, to religion to mass media. Brilliantly funny yet deeply insightful, these poems illuminate Codrescu’s acerbic tone and outsized personality and capture the best of his oeuvre.