NewPages Blog :: Books

The idea of completely understanding the processes of any revolutionary change is daunting—to say nothing of making sense of its cultural and historical contexts. In the historic waves of North American feminist theory and practices, the respective paradigms of feminism shift, evolve, and ultimately normalize along lines of particular intellectual circles and politically historic movements. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the first convention for women’s rights and suffrage in 1848, for example, show a completely different, and seemingly unparalleled, cultural milieu than a feminist theorist like twenty-first century philosopher Judith Butler. Both women, however, illustrate a “revolutionary context” for understanding a broader feminist identity, however constructed—both show the powerful effects of change within particular societal circumstances. In Writing the Revolution: The Feminist History Project’s Collected Columns of Michele Landsberg, Canadian writer, social activist, and ardent feminist Michele Landsberg reminds us that beyond any of the historical feminist revolutions are the people of the revolutions—women and their narratives. From Landsberg’s columns, we get the sense that she finds feminism on the ground, in everyday life, to be the centering force that keeps the falcon of feminist theory from circling out in a wider and wider gyre of culture. Continue reading “Writing the Revolution”

In Panic Attack, USA, the debut collection of poetry by Nate Slawson, the poems rush full speed with wounded but open hearts into the wild and unpredictable future. “I call my heart Megaphone,” a speaker claims in the poem “July 4,” “because I sometimes feel / epic when I feel / with my complete circulatory / system.” Each poem in the collection seems to have speakers with these megaphone hearts, speakers who feel epic when feeling, who have the volume cranked to eleven 24/7. Continue reading “Panic Attack, USA”

In Hypotheticals, the scientific method breaks down into a scattering of hypothetical circumstances. Leigh Kotsilidis’s debut poetry collection delves into the reimagining of knowledge and personhood, questioning, on an elemental scale, the configuration of the world. A variety of formal and free verse poems, Hypotheticals takes a hard yet lyrical look at the creatures and objects that inhabit our planet, inviting the reader in to experience these strange and surprising sensations. Continue reading “Hypotheticals”

The Cisco Kid in the Bronx is a Caribbean emigrant bildungsroman that at moments may remind the reader of the classic collection Drown by Junot Diaz. Ortiz’s collection certainly fulfills many of the conventions of what could be considered a Caribbean Diaspora literature. Continue reading “The Cisco Kid in the Bronx”

In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg gives a vivid description of life in California from the 1950s-1960s. Setterberg’s style of writing quickly pulls the reader into his world. I’ve never been to California, my parents were born in the years when his story begins and I seemingly have nothing in common with Setterberg’s experiences, but that doesn’t matter at all. The people in his “true-life novel” are so vivid that almost instantly you understand how their minds work and their relationships to each other. Continue reading “Lunch Bucket Paradise”

Admitting his aim is to provoke, and filled with acidic rectitude, Anis Shivani rants on in Against the Workshop about what demonstrably awful affects MFA programs have upon American writing. Under his analysis, the entire academic system of American letters appears corrupt: a viral sham in which all involved would feel ashamed if only they weren’t so mired within its murky workings. Shivani’s not exactly wrong—his points are, for the most part, well made, and there’s no doubting his sincerity. Yet despite the at-times attractive bluster Shivani coats his commentary in, he fails to finally offer up any central focus for complaint. This haphazard collection of book reviews and essay-length, bombastic taking-to-task of academic career fiction writers and poets is finally nothing but a roller-coaster jaunt through several publications of the last decade or so; Shivani’s arguments realize no greater whole to counter his provocative railings against the status quo. Continue reading “Against the Workshop”

selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee is a collection of unpublished blog entries that teeters between poetry and prose writing. Rarely do I come across writing that can pass as both styles, which is interesting. There are no capital letters in the entire book, which adds to the informal tone. Assuming the collection is autobiographical (as it stems from blog posts), Boyle is a 23-year-old bi-curious stoner who records her life. It is one of the most honest pieces I have ever read; she even lists every single person she has had sex with, never leaving out minor details such as whether or not they used condoms and if she had orgasms. After describing each of her 21 partners, Boyle enters a brief moment of self-reflection: “relieved I don’t have AIDS or children.” Continue reading “selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee”

A fan of Judith Kitchen’s Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief anthologies of flash nonfiction, I could not wait to get a hold of Half in Shade, which—it turns out—is not your standard memwah. Rather, it is a collection of prose poems disguised as essays, the only difference between the two being how they’re typeset on the page. Kitchen characterizes it as “a series of lyric pieces written variously to, from, or around old photographs found in family albums and scrapbooks.” Whatever you call them, each of the lyric tidbits develops before the reader as if with toners and fixers and gelatin-silver in a darkroom, the process yielding startling and wondrous results. Continue reading “Half in Shade”

Within this brief but multitudinous chapbook, Ann Cefola contemplates ordinary existence alongside the sacred. In 28 poems of varying form—some splaying across the page, others in neat, organized stanzas—St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped investigates the constant buzz and movement of modern existence through these lyrical narratives. The world of schoolboys, make-up counters, hotels that may appear familiar is elevated into something of greater importance. Continue reading “St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped”

In the late eighteenth- through mid-nineteenth centuries, the British Empire exiled close to 162,000 men, women, and children under the Transportation Act to serve their prison sentences in Australia—simultaneously ridding Britain of an overcrowded prison population and providing the Empire with expendable colonists. Continue reading “The Tin Ticket”

Vinnie Wilhelm’s “Fautleroy’s Ghost,” included in his short story collection In the Absence of Predators, first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review. I remember reading it and feeling great affection for a writer who could encompass an empathetic account of the doomed revolutionary faith of both Leon Trotsky and Patrice Lumumba within a Hollywood spoof. Ben Stuckey leaves his leaky living room in Seattle to pitch his script for a bio-pic of Trotsky: Continue reading “In the Absence of Predators”

Prior to audio and video, theatre history is a frustratingly silent one. Reviews, illustrations, journal entries, photographs, designs, and prompt books are helpful—and rare. Continue reading “Starring Madame Modjeska”

It is impossible to think of forking paths without recalling Borges’s garden of innumerable possibilities. And so in James Grinwis’s second book of poems, Exhibit of Forking Paths, selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the National Poetry Series, it makes sense that we find a poetry of possibilities and alternatives, a bit of play, an interest in “what the sounds mean before the definitions of sounds,” and a space where things can simultaneously be and not be. The title poem, which opens the book, presents different lives captured on numbered tablets, with the speaker coyly stating, “In the case of tablet 31, we will not speak.” Grinwis delivers a lot in this collection, but he reminds us we cannot have it all. Continue reading “Exhibit of Forking Paths”

The title of Bruce Jay Friedman’s new “literary” memoir, Lucky Bruce, is an understatement. All the old adages about luck come to mind, you make your own luck, some are luckier than others, etc., but when you read Friedman’s life story you can’t help but agree: Bruce is one lucky guy. Continue reading “Lucky Bruce”

The principal aim of The City, Our City, the latest poetry collection by Wayne Miller, is to construct a difficult, philosophical poetics that most audiences will have trouble wrestling into meaning. I have no problem with being pleasantly mystified or even confused (Lynn Emanuel’s latest work baffles me even as I gasp with wonder), but this book straddles a fine line between unsettling readers and completely turning them off. Since Miller’s previous volumes, especially The Book of Props, have won praise from many circles (including The New Yorker), perhaps he need not worry about losing readers; his audience may well be confined to those in the academy. And after all, The City, Our City does still showcase the poet’s remarkable skill, though it should be noted that his most successful poems establish a scene and context in which his talent begins to shine. In “Winter Pastoral,” a quiet love poem, he writes: Continue reading “The City, Our City”

Disclosure is by far one of the most interesting books I have ever read. It should perhaps be called “Full Disclosure,” as Lomax presents us with so many fragments from various areas of her life. Some pieces disclosed to us are FAFSA forms, an acceptance letter into the Peace Corps, pay stubs from several different jobs (including Taco Bell), student reviews of her teaching skills, bank statements, and medical forms. Lomax has no qualms about baring all of the personal, private information in these documents. Continue reading “Disclosure”

It’s clear within the first few paragraphs that Alan Kaufman has no intention of holding anything back in Drunken Angel. The book brings the reader into his life as a young writer, a soldier in Israel, a husband, an addict, and finally a father, with many more twists and turns throughout. There were moments, while reading, that I disliked things he did and had I met him then, I probably wouldn’t have liked him very much. However, Kaufman’s willingness to open up so completely to his reader, to put himself in such a vulnerable position, won my respect. Continue reading “Drunken Angel”

Erri de Luca’s The Day Before Happiness, a bildungsroman set in Naples after WWII, shows both memories of the war and the city at that time, focusing on characters in an apartment complex. It also offers poetic insights along with humor. The lyrical style ultimately doesn’t distinguish the two main characters, even though one is a boy and one his caretaker/mentor, but the humor does distinguish another character in his nouveau riche ignorance. Continue reading “The Day Before Happiness”

Brooklyn Arts Press has entered the business of publishing chapbooks with a collection about endings. Joe Fletcher, whose previous publications include the chapbook Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press), evokes in Already It Is Dusk a world drunk on its own decay, whose fields are “abandoned by sowers” and whose “soldiers stare blankly at the smoldering embassy.” While not as bleak as, say, Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, this world is peopled with monsters such as “Ben Nez the Winged,” who threatens to suck the breath from that poem’s narrator, so that he “drag[s his] boots to smear [his] tracks.” More often than not, the monster is within, such as in “Hunting” when the hunter must “Pry the chickens’ chests open / with my beak” after they “walk right up into my outstretched arms.” Continue reading “Already It Is Dusk”

Russian writer Nikolai Gogol is famous for his serious satiric novel The Overcoat, but The Night Before Christmas, originally published in a 1926 short story collection, was Gogol’s first work at age 27—an early contribution to Russian literature. Recognized then for its fine writing and humor, now it can also be appreciated as a charming picture of Ukrainian folklore. Instead of Scrooge or the Grinch, the devil and a witch make mischief on a night full of mystical forces, the night before Christmas. Continue reading “The Night Before Christmas”

Ten stories make up Tiff Holland’s collection, Betty Superman. The stories themselves are short; altogether they fill only thirty-four pages, stapled into a lovely little edition from Rose Metal Press. But the size of Holland’s collection is deceiving. These stories cover the span of a life as only linked shorts can. They invite the reader to fill in the spaces between the wacky and outrageous scenarios our narrator and her mother, Betty, find themselves in. Continue reading “Betty Superman”

Steve Fellner’s collection of poems, The Weary World Rejoices, has much more weariness in it than rejoicing, but that is only because, as he writes in the first of three odes to Matthew Shepard, “Explanation never // satisfies. It / always wants // something / like redemption.” Fellner is not trying to explain what it is like to be a gay man in 21st-century America; instead, he is trying to redeem it by showing the varieties of that life as it actually is. Continue reading “The Weary World Rejoices”

As a kid growing up in a rural community in central Ohio during the 1960s, I heard the word “Communist” bandied about as if it were the lowest form of life to crawl across the American landscape. I thought for a time they had to be like the ogres in Grimm’s fairytales who kidnapped children and ate them. Surely they lurked behind every corner. They were to be feared and exterminated. Commies were bad. Continue reading “Red Plenty”

After more than fifty years of James Laughlin’s New Directions publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, to have yet another new collection is a splendid surprise. Although many of these translations already appear in Williams’s Collected Poems, when all are gathered together from these separate sources and placed in company with a few other renegade poems not found there, the continuing necessity of considering the influence of Williams’s biracial heritage upon his work is evident. To not recognize this aspect of Williams’s identity is to risk missing a key component of his poetry. This is a danger editor Jonathan Cohen notes with his assertion that “Pound failed to understand that Williams identified himself as American because of his Hispanic background.” The multi-layered cultural identity of Williams celebrates the rich, fertile brewing ground that the Americas remain. Continue reading “By Word of Mouth”

Josh Rolnick writes like a storyteller. He places his characters in the middle of complex situations, but doesn’t leave them stranded. Instead, he inhabits their psyches and builds compelling scenes for them to respond to trouble in the best way they know how, by lunging headlong into it. Meanwhile he creates scenes that rivet you to a sliver of time and the gloom of place, sweeping you up in the first sentences of his eight tales and setting you down at the end of each one with greater faith in the human race. Continue reading “Pulp and Paper”

Novels that focus on contemporary foibles are often flattened in time by the ephemeral. In Thrown into Nature, Bulgarian writer Milen Ruskov sidesteps the obsolescence problem by giving us a picaresque novel set in sixteenth century Spain. Guimarães da Silva, acolyte and student, narrates his adventures with his mentor, Dr. Monardes, a true figure out of history, the “discoverer” and promoter of tobacco as the cure for whatever ails you. Continue reading “Thrown into Nature”

“We are nothing but characters in a book” surmises the child narrator forever staring into the window of “Mrs. Q.’s Drugstore.” It is left to the reader to determine the exact relationship among the trio of peepers and if they ever work up the courage to see those “things that she must have at the counter.” But by the end of Death-In-A-Box readers will have a very good idea of Alta Ifland’s writing talent. Continue reading “Death-In-A-Box”

Will Boast’s Power Ballads, winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, can at times feel as layered and as over-produced as its moniker. For one, the book, thematically linking the lives of various musicians, unfolds as a short-story cycle, which by the nature of the form allows a freedom and an unevenness to the storytelling on par with, say, Van Halen post-David Lee Roth. Continue reading “Power Ballads”

The Blood Lie is labeled as a Young Adult/Jewish Studies book, but I think the main intention of the writer was to present it as Jewish Studies. The characters, plot, and narration did not seem aimed at appealing to the young adult reader, but at telling a story of Jewish history. A young girl, Daisy, gets lost in the woods and the Jewish people of the town are accused of kidnapping her for a blood sacrifice for Yom Kippur. These people are soon ostracized and forced to band together. Continue reading “The Blood Lie”

Murray Shugars’s collection of poems, Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, is clearly divided into three sections with distinct differences in approaches to the craft. The first section, which gives the book its title, is the strongest of the three, as Shugars creates a distinct world in this section. These poems are much more narrative than the other two sections and draw mostly on his childhood, though the speaker of the poems moves into adulthood in the poems about war. Continue reading “Songs My Mother Never Taught Me”

In 2012, Martha Rhodes will come out with her fourth collection of poetry, titled The Beds. Continue reading “The Beds”

In the opening scene of Almost Never, by Mexican writer Daniel Sada, the perturbed protagonist, Demetrio, an “agronomist” in Oaxaca, ponders his humdrum life. What will relieve his tedium? The answer: “Sex, as an apt pretext for breaking the monotony; motor-sex; anxiety-sex; the habit of sex, as any glut that can well become a burden; colossal, headlong, frenzied ambiguous sex … pretense-sex, see-through sex. Pleasure, in the end, as praise that goes against the grain of life.” Continue reading “Almost Never”

The seven stories that make up Stuart Nadler’s spirited debut collection, The Book of Life, are about men: husbands and boyfriends, fathers and brothers, sons and grandsons. They’re about relationships, the mistakes and the misunderstandings. As a whole, the collection strikes a balance between characters who reclaim a portion of what is lost and those who are humbled by their circumstances and left to persevere. Infidelity is the crux of six out of the seven stories, but Nadler’s characters find surprises inside surprises inside surprises, spiraling the life out of any potential clichés. Continue reading “The Book of Life”

For those familiar with the French folktale “Bluebeard,” especially in its various versions such as the British “Mr. Fox” and “Fitcher’s Bird,” Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Mr. Fox will delight. Even if you are not familiar with these other versions, you get them in this novel. You only need to love fairy tale convolutions, especially when blended with real-life situations. Continue reading “Mr. Fox”

Hard to Say, recently published by PANK, contains a collection of short personal stories that will pluck at your heartstrings. Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through the Bone and Dark Sky Books, executes the tone of youthful awkwardness with the perfect amount of bittersweet. The pangs of childhood tales and oddities resonate throughout the book, keeping the reader drawn until the finish. Continue reading “Hard to Say”

Spoken word is powerful not only in language, but also performance. It can be difficult to capture the essence and emotion on the page; however, the writers in –gape–seed– have done just that. The diverse selection of poetry made it difficult to choose the best writers as each distinct piece had punch and power. At first I was wary; making a successful anthology of spoken word seemed like a tall order, but –gape–seed– inspired me to really feel the language as opposed to just reading it. Continue reading “–gape–seed–”

It wasn’t that long ago when Broadway producers put originality before the box office and tourists. In 1979, the New York Shakespeare Festival moved Runaways, another in a series of sold-out shows (the most successful 1975’s A Chorus Line; the most recent 2010’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), uptown from Astor Place. The musical, featuring real runaway teenagers, was composed, written, and directed by Elizabeth Swados. Runaways received multiple Tony nominations and established Liz Swados’s reputation. As she makes clear in Waiting: Selected Nonfiction, she has been “trashed, resurrected, trashed, and mentored dozens of young artists. I’ve survived well.” Despite its brief length, Waiting is a thoroughly friendly introduction to Swados’s life and work, a wistful remembrance of a vibrant era in New York theatre, and a perceptive look at how theatre is created. Continue reading “Waiting: Selected Nonfiction”

I picked up Habibi and thumbed through it with the intent of gathering its basic information for NewPages. Only a small number of the books we receive here are graphic novels, and my familiarity with the genre extends to buying Batman comics for a family member and having watched the movie version of Sin City. So I was curious to see what a two-inch-thick graphic novel consisted of. Continue reading “Habibi”

Carolyn Weber’s relationship with Oxford University began with a surprise when she received a letter in the mail announcing that she had won a full scholarship to pursue her post-graduate studies there. Without her knowledge, a professor had submitted her name for consideration for the scholarship. The book chronicles many more surprises that accompany Weber’s Oxford experience, most significantly her spiritual journey from cynical agnostic to evangelical Christian. Without a note of self-pity, Weber describes growing up in poverty with her mother and siblings after her father abandoned the family. A high-achieving student, she realized that through hard work she could improve her future prospects and become self-sufficient. Weber’s admission that she lied about her age on the application in order to qualify for her first job is particularly poignant following recollections of her family’s lavish lifestyle during her early childhood, before her father’s questionable business deals and resulting arrest doomed the family to financial devastation. Continue reading “Surprised by Oxford”

I have to admire a writer who attempts to take on the adult male sexual psyche. As a 52-year-old male myself, it’s still a mystery to me. John Franc, however, has attempted such a feat in his new novel, Hooked. Franc’s tale involves the bonding of a group of middle-aged men who meet socially two or three times a month for poker or drinks. They are white, successful, and of course, bored as hell. Their wives are the proverbial soccer moms though still “hot” according to the husbands. They have children, are married and have the potential to be pillars of their community. Continue reading “Hooked”

A Mortal Affect, Vincent Standley’s debut novel and the latest release from Calamari Press, is all about creating a world, inventing a vocabulary, and then approaching a proposed conundrum of what it would be like to have a portion of the world immortal, and a portion not. Full of Dante-esque circles of assigned living, painted blue welfare blocs of housing, Rooters (the mortal creatures that populate the novel), and Malkings (the immortals who vie for appropriate living throughout A Mortal Affect), this is a book that attempts to grow a universe, roots and all, in a mere two hundred pages: Continue reading “A Mortal Affect”

Lindy is married to Hugh. They live in the Midwest. Adam is married to Jan. They live in Brooklyn. Lindy and Adam have resumed their affair that began in Manhattan and ended when Hugh took over his family’s bicycle business. Jan and Hugh know what’s going on but there are careers, children, and, most importantly, routines to consider. Routines that hurt rather than ease. Continue reading “Loving Longing Leaving”

Doug Nufer makes me wish I knew more about horse racing because if I was more knowledgeable about horse races and the art of betting on this sport, I’d get so much more from By Kelman Out of Pessoa. As book 4 of 5 in the TrenchArt Recon Series, Nufer’s novel swings a wide arc of gambled characters and the throw of the die, using a backdrop of gaming as the setting of the novel as well as a means to writing it, a sleight of hand best described by the editors of Les Figues Press: Continue reading “By Kelman Out of Pessoa”

When we think about North American geography and ghost stories, the Midwest United States feels somewhat lacking. Maybe that’s because we think of the region historically as merely a way toward somewhere else, and thus any good haunting it might have acquired also feels ephemeral. Ghosts also require a decent amount of tragedy. The East has its colonies and its Puritanical roots based in part on superstitions. The South, of course, has its own tragic pillar of slavery and its gothic aftermath. Even the West has plenty of dead and displaced Native Americans. So the Midwest would seem to need its own man-made disaster to birth some spirits. Continue reading “Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them”

Lisa Fay Coutley’s most recent chapbook highlights numerous poems published in an array of literary magazines. Within each poem, the ideas are very fragmented; however, Coutley weaves them together so that each idea feeds from the one that precedes it. While there may be an overall theme, no poem constricts to one image; instead, she creates a collage of images to support a theme. For example, in her poem “After the Fire”: Continue reading “In the Carnival of Breathing”

In Memphis, Tennessee, where I live, the evidence is abundant that our country has not yet achieved racial equality. African Americans make up 61% of the metropolis’ population, and a recent report revealed that 24% of the population lives below the poverty level. Stephanie Deutsch’s You Need a Schoolhouse reminds us that, although we have a long way to go to achieve equality, our country has made notable strides in the 146 years since the end of the Civil War. Continue reading “You Need a Schoolhouse”

AnimalInside is a haunting parable of the apocalypse. Not since Yeats’s darkly poetic prophecy of the second coming has literature imagined such a sinister messiah. However, Krasznahorkai’s baleful parable not only predicts the beast’s malefic resurrection, it graphically details its emergence. Continue reading “AnimalInside”

This is the first full collection of poetry by Alberto Blanco to appear in a bilingual edition in the United States. While his reputation in his native Mexico and abroad is well established, here in the States, aside from receiving significant university appointments, he’s relatively less known. Bitter Oleander Press and translator Jennifer Rathbun are out to change that. Continue reading “Afterglow / Tras el Rayo”

Chinese writer Can Xue’s short story collection Vertical Motion captures dream/nightscapes like Steven Milhauser and the surreal like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The short stories do reflect real life in activities and mostly relationships, but as she says in one of her stories, “Fantasy is still the way we do things best,” which seems to mean through fantastical experiences people improve. Thus each story explores a “new realm of imagination.” Continue reading “Vertical Motion”

Calyx of Teversall will entice you from the first sentence to the very last. Maia Appleby’s prose ensnares the reader in a fictional world that is both interesting and realistic at the same time. She plays off of what the young reader is already familiar with in order to structure this fantasy world full of gnomes and elves. In the beginning, we learn that Sigrid is recently widowed and struggling to make ends meet. Her husband maintained a wheat field that she now undertakes, and her three-year-old son Charlie braids the wheat. When Fenbeck, secretly a Borgh Elf, arrives and strikes a deal, Sigrid has no choice but to accept. Fenbeck magically turns many times the normal crop yield and accepts no payment but asserts that Charlie must work for him when he turns nine for one year. Continue reading “Calyx of Teversall”