NewPages Blog :: Books

If you are prowling for something truly chilling to read, Edgar and International Horror Guild Award-nominated author Brian Evenson’s collection of unsettling short fiction, Fugue State, may be just the thing to curdle your blood. Accompanied by illustrations from the multi-talented graphic novelist Zak Sally, Fugue State also includes an evocative graphic short that brings “Dread” to life. Each of the book’s nineteen stories include subjects who tenuously skirt the borderlines of sanity and the edges of awareness, of substantive reality. Significantly, Evenson successfully marries the usually disparate genres of horror and literary fiction. Continue reading “Fugue State”

Johnny ‘Blue’ Heron is a private eye more interested in sex and alcohol than the steady job he could have with the local police. Blue is hired by George Fuller to trai his son to find out if the younger Fuller is having an affair. This deceptively simple job lands Blue in the middle of affairs, intrigue, incest, corruption, and some rather shady business deals. Blue comes off as cynical sort of fellow, believing that no one is quite what they appear to be (“Always thought I was a fake, but aren’t we all. We invent ourselves and defy the world to discover the ruse.”), but he is surprisingly unaware of some people’s darker sides. Continue reading “Swan Dive”

Synopsizing her own book The Subversive Scribe, Suzanne Jill Levine in “Cositas Are Not Things,” the book’s penultimate chapter, writes: Continue reading “The Subversive Scribe”

Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery’s slim but savory novel, is like poetry served on a platter – filled with dazzling and delicious language. The story begins with the world’s most famous (and most despised) food critic realizing that he will die in 48 hours. Monsieur Pierre Arthens lives in Paris, in the building immortalized in Barbery’s first novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Continue reading “Gourmet Rhapsody”

Few aspects of personal experience are taboo any longer, but Lorraine López has collected a set of essays in this anthology that address an emerging topic of national conversation: what does it mean to grow up poor? In our current cultural moment, when the availability of health care for all Americans is being negotiated, the concerns of this collection are particularly sage. Continue reading “An Angle of Vision”

A handsome former soap star, tired of his shallow, fat-free life, kidnaps a pastry chef to do his bidding. A woman, suddenly obsessed with the domestic arts, breaks into someone’s home and begins cooking and cleaning while they’re gone. We all have strange, fleeting impulses – Suzanne Burns’s characters act on them. Continue reading “Misfits and Other Heroes”

The 35 fiction pieces and 15 poems from The Sun magazine collected for this anthology deal with passion, longing, and romantic love. As editor Sy Safransky so aptly describes this work, “[It is] about the room upstairs at the end of the hall, shared by two lovers who’ve decided to stay – for a weekend or forever, no one can say. Sometimes they kiss, sometimes they bite. They dream they’re in heaven. They swear they’re in hell. That room.” This room is occupied by a range of men and women of various cultures, ages, and sexual persuasions, and, as with any and all relationships, the dynamics of each relationship portrayed here is as individual as its author could imagine. Continue reading “The Mysterious Life of the Heart”

Missing Her is a moving, elegant series of poems, or elegies, that examines loss on both a very public and a private level. Keelan’s topics include Mary after the birth of Jesus, the Vietnam War, September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, and the death of her father. In “About Suffering They Were,” she writes, “There are no old poems, / Only new textbooks directing / The unprepared student to the painting / Behind the poem.” In Missing Her, we are all unprepared students, and Keelan leads us not merely to her poems but to the truths behind poetry. Continue reading “Missing Her”

Steven Schroeder and his brain like to wander. Whether physically through the landscapes of Colorado, or mentally through recollections of schadenfreude, Schroeder drags his rucksack of modern references behind him. String theory, Asimov, army-town life, thermodynamics – all pop up naturally in the course of his bizarre musings. Continue reading “Torched Verse Ends”

This children’s picture book follows Sophie’s search for the warmest place in her house after spending time outside playing in the snow. Ultimately, the warmest place is snuggled up next to her parents in their bed during the middle of the night. The story is light and sweet while the illustrations are delightful and fun. Altogether, a great book for bedtime. Continue reading “The Warmest Place of All”

I loved this book! I think I fell in love with it the first time the main character, Lee, mentions Anne of Green Gables and her excitement about meeting a “real-life orphan,” Cassandra, who is moving in with a relative next door. Anne was my favorite character from children’s books when I was a kid. She felt like a real person to me – a friend, someone I wanted to meet, someone I wanted to be like, someone I was – dare I say it? – jealous of – exactly the way Lee feels. But being an orphan in real life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as Lee finds out when she becomes friends with Cassandra. Continue reading “Home Free”

Falco begins this novel by introducing us, one by one, to the characters: Avery, a rebellious art student at Penn State, Lindsey and Hank, Avery’s aunt and uncle, and Kate, Avery’s widowed mother who is having an affair with Hank, her brother-in-law. The main story involves Avery and Grant, a thirty-something former performance artist from New York she meets at a campus party. Avery runs away to New York with the mysterious Grant after knowing him for less than 24 hours. In New York, Avery is thrown into the heart of the avant-garde art scene; Grant’s friends include a famous artist, a successful TV writer and a restaurateur. Grant himself had early success as a writer, but after he killed a man in self-defense while trucking stolen goods across state lines for his shady uncle Billy, he stopped writing. Now Grant’s only source of income is further work for Billy, who keeps him on the fringes of his criminal enterprises out of respect for his brother, Grant’s father. Continue reading “Saint John of the Five Boroughs”

In his second collection of short fiction, Tod Goldberg delivers ten seductive stories that target the traumatic reality of failed dreams and the struggle to make amends with the past. Each kinetic story pulses and pops with authenticity. Goldberg has not a word misplaced, often times weaving tragedy and beauty with the result of heartbreaking height, similar in style to Mark Richard or Thom Jones. His characters find themselves trapped, whether literally or figuratively – lost in a world where they cannot connect with the projected image of themselves or attain the goal of a satisfied life. In one of the most moving and powerful stories “Walls,” Goldberg navigates the fractured childhood of an unspecified number of siblings, using We as the narrator, dissecting their Mother’s sexual relationships to ultimate and devastating effects. Continue reading “Other Resort Cities”

“I try to name the thing we never missed until it was lost, all the things that never stood a chance in this beautiful world.” So ends “My Neighbor Doesn’t Remember Everything She Forgets” from Stephanie Johnson’s debut One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, and it may well serve as a capsule of its concerns: to carefully observe life’s vicissitudes, to spotlight minutiae, to bear witness. The book is filled with internal squalls and domestic squabbles. In story after story, scene after scene, there is Johnson’s unwavering focus, and you can almost see her sharpening her senses. Continue reading “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others”

In the introduction to her most recent book of poetry, Van Gogh in Poems, Carol Dine writes of the research she undertook to pen her artist-inspired poems. Her book, she writes, led her to Amsterdam three times, where she visited the Van Gogh Museum to study the artist’s original work – up close. Dine describes how she was allowed to sit in a room while an attendant brought her requested works on paper. She studied them for inspiration, and deemed them holy. Her viewing of the artist’s sketchbook brought her to tears. Van Gogh in Poems contains 18 plates of the artist’s works on paper. Continue reading “Van Gogh in Poems”

The characters that populate Nathan Graziano’s new book of poetry, After the Honeymoon, remind me of my neighbors and friends growing up in working class Philadelphia: many of these folks had rough, troubled lives, and more often than not happiness was squelched by substance abuse, poverty, poor education, and unemployment. It was the rare exception that someone had the self-reflection and self-discipline to ascend the neighborhood’s social pitfalls. While Graziano’s book could be set in almost any working poor urban area in our country, its depictions of hard-scrabbled living – and the desire to rise above it – is utterly familiar to my autobiography and is refreshing to see in contemporary poetry. Continue reading “After the Honeymoon”

In a 1948 conversation with John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac said, “Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation.” The phrase, like Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation,” soon became emblematic of its time, though not all of its adherents approve of the label (Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder are just three of its detractors). What most of the “Beats” found in Beats at Naropa have in common is their connection with Kerouac himself. The book contains mostly transcripts of speeches and conversations held at what is now called Naropa University but what was originally known as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a compulsively readable volume, full of facts and opinions. Continue reading “Beats at Naropa: An Anthology”

Life Goes to the Movies tells of the uncanny friendship of two men growing up in the 1970s. Both men struggle to define who they are in a world where they don’t seem to fit in. Nigel DePoli, son of Italian immigrants, wants desperately to be someone with a sense of belonging. Dwaine Fitzgibbon is looking for a way to be separate from society while still intermingling enough to show others the parts of life that they don't normally see. Their bond begins in a mutual love of movies and only grows stronger as they start making short films that show “true life” rather than losing “themselves in some totally made up bullshit that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with real life.” However, things change as Dwaine becomes more passionate about his movies and Nigel desires more and more the ‘normal’ life that Dwaine diverted him from. The reader will find themselves laughing at some of Dwaine’s outrageous ideas and rooting for the friends when things seem to be at their lowest point. An enjoyable read from the beginning, Selgin grabs the reader’s interest and drags them along for all of Nigel and Dwaine’s fascinating adventures in life and film. Continue reading “Life Goes to the Movies”

Even for a novella (though the publishers call it a novel) of slightly over one hundred and thirty pages, there is not a lot of plot movement in Rupert: A Confession. The story is basic: the protagonist, Rupert, gives a three-art confession to a jury about a crime he was alleged to commit. In the process, we discover he has a vast array of pornography meticulously cataloged, has been thrown out of massage parlor for ejaculating on the proprietor, and conceives of his own life as either a stage production or an offspring of Japanese warriors. Otherwise, the book centers on the rise and fall of his idealized girlfriend Mira, who at turns is taciturn, cranky, or sexually insatiable. Continue reading “Rupert: A Confession”

Even for a novella (though the publishers call it a novel) of slightly over one hundred and thirty pages, there is not a lot of plot movement in Rupert: A Confession. The story is basic: the protagonist, Rupert, gives a three-art confession to a jury about a crime he was alleged to commit. In the process, we discover he has a vast array of pornography meticulously cataloged, has been thrown out of massage parlor for ejaculating on the proprietor, and conceives of his own life as either a stage production or an offspring of Japanese warriors. Otherwise, the book centers on the rise and fall of his idealized girlfriend Mira, who at turns is taciturn, cranky, or sexually insatiable. Continue reading “Rupert: A Confession”

Matthew Vollmer’s impressive debut collection grates its characters against their fate, pitting their desires and their beliefs against each other as these brightly rendered tales unfold. These are well constructed, richly polished stories that rely heavily on nuanced events to deliver powerful and precise emotion. Characters struggle with sexuality, social acceptance, and death – often times through the filter of non-mainstream Christian faith. The result is an odd and heightened sense of guilt and grief. Continue reading “Future Missionaries of America”

[Here’s my flash review of Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction:] Continue reading “The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction”

What would you give up to pursue a dream? In this rich and wonderful novel for people of all ages, a 9-year-old boy named Niner is willing to sell his guardian angel in exchange for money so that he and his friend, a homeless man called Cosmos, can travel to the sea and open an “ice cold drinks” stand. But once Niner sells his guardian angel, a terrible thing happens: he is left without protection, vulnerable to any whim of fate, germ, or accident. The story’s plot hinges on this one question: will he be able to get his guardian angel back before he dies? Continue reading “Beyond the Station Lies the Sea”

Every poem in Paschen's Bestiary has been carefully groomed; each poem still stays a little feral, mostly concerning what strange things we do in our own familiar homes: A woman bears the chrysalis of her son in her wandering body, a mother nurses amid a welter of storybook patterns, the vagaries of gods and storms and men thunder in the background… Continue reading “Bestiary”

This microscopic look at France’s attempt to join two different parts of the world through outside labor is done in an honest and unbiased way through the two very different characters of Thomas and Byron. W.B. Garvey, the author of this climatic and colorful novel, writes with a straightforward and no-games-played style that evokes as broad a spectrum of emotion as the music Garvey is famous for playing on his violin. In his novel, Panama Fever, Garvey details the beginning stages of what we now know as the Panama Canal, enriching the pages with truthful character and landscape settings. Continue reading “Panama Fever”

Andean Express by Bolivian journalist Juan de Recacoechea follows a slew of intriguing characters on an overnight train ride from Bolivia to Chile. Continue reading “Andean Express”

Andrew Zornoza’s expansive, fragmentary Where I Stay is a piecemeal construction of text and image. An epigraph, penned in 1938 by Walker Evans, simultaneously urges the reader and the eye behind the camera to focus on “[t]hese anonymous people who come and go in the cities and who move on the land,” on “what is in their faces and in the windows and the streets beside and around them.” Fittingly, it is just those elements, particular to an individual’s specific moment, time and place, that capture the anonymous sense of the national spirit. Continue reading “Where I Stay”

The wind. The East China Sea. Time gnawing on the shore. In the eight assured short stories in his first collection, Yoon takes us through fifty years on the fictional Korean island of Solla, where his characters map out lives eroded by warfare and polished by a series of tender passing moments. Continue reading “Once the Shore”

Anderson’s sophomore novel explores one young man’s descent into schizophrenia as he responds to an erratic and arbitrary world filled with a dysfunctional alcoholic mother, a disappearing stepfather, and a best friend with problems as large as his own. Continue reading “Border Crossing”

Rick Reid’s full-length book of poetry, to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length, reads like a flip book in which lines have been inverted and language turned on its head. When read through quickly without too deep an analysis, the language evokes the impression of a fractured scene. Not only the imagery, but also the language is fragmented, the poet’s linguistic ear sometimes approximating that of an ESL speaker. Continue reading “to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length”

Huda Al-Mukhtar lives in a world full of fragile yet vivid memories – of a city before it was torn apart by war and bloodshed; of a loving marriage before it dissolved into two strangers; of a daughter before she was forced to choose between parents. Continue reading “Canceled Memories”

Motoko Rich in “Translation Is Foreign to U.S. Publishers,” in the New York Times last year, claimed that U.S. editors “are generally more likely to bid on other hyped American or British titles than to look for new literature in the international halls.” There are exceptions of course, like Graywolf Press and Archipelago Books, as well as university presses like Open Letter at the University of Rochester. And there’s Dalkey Archive Press, an avatar of publishing works-in-translation, boasting titles from many sorely underrepresented countries. And with their new book Translation in Practice: A Symposium, Dalkey is the trailblazer once again. Continue reading “Translationin Practice”

In George Rabasa’s The Wonder Singer, traditional genre tropes break from convention and expectation, creating a lovely cliché-bending crime novel with the pacing and plot of Elmore Leonard and the heart and scope of Russell Banks. Rabasa opens his novel with the death of the wonder singer, the operatic diva Merce Casals. His simple-seeming characters wear their occupations as their identity in life, all stuck and starving for an unbridled happiness: the opera singer, the writer, the nurse, the wife, the agent – all searching for something greater. Continue reading “The Wonder Singer”

In The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo’s collection of essays on poetry and writing, he has this to say on the subject of sentimentality: Continue reading “Zero at the Bone”

Beloved on the Earth is a timeless anthology, a meditation on “our capacity for wonder and for grief” (“Reconsidering the Enlightenment” by Donna J. Long). The Gratitude of the subtitle isn’t really necessary. This is an elegy, a mourning, a wail for the dying and the dead. Some poets are familiar, some aren’t. Some poems take pages, and some, like Larry Schug’s “Bearing,” barely seven lines: Continue reading “Belovedon the Earth”

In this interesting anthology of modern poetry the editors have chosen to emphasize the craft of poetry, as well as its creations. All too often, either out of a desire to demonstrate important developments or to present only the work that will be preserved for posterity on the part of editors, contemporary poetry anthologies are at least a generation behind. These anthologies seem interested only in “poetry [that] was poetry, not a poet writing. Shakespeare was poetry. Blake and Dickinson were poetry.” The regulating of poetry to the past tense has in a way marginalized working writers, whose craft it sometimes seems is only discussed seriously in MFA programs and literary journals. 12 x 12 changes that by bringing the discussion of craft into the foreground. To accomplish this, the editors had emerging poets speak with established ones who had influenced their writing. These conversations are bookended by selections from each of the contributors. Continue reading “12 x 12”

Joshua Beckman's fifth collection of poetry Take It, a title suggesting both offer and imperative, is the product of a big heart and a far-ranging imagination. Published without titles, the poems read like non-sequiturs, each one unfolding with peculiar associations of imagery and thought. The language can move from high-flowing rhetoric to obscenity in a matter of lines, and the personas are a varied cast of characters. This epistolary piece, for example, could be the satirical jottings of Vasco da Gama: Continue reading “Take It”

In these beautifully crafted poems, Celia Gilbert explores love and loss and what it means to be a daughter and a Jew. There’s hardly a poem here that doesn’t ache with feeling. Continue reading “Something to Exchange”

If divorce is a totaled car, then Eugene Lim’s Fog & Car is a multiple vehicle pile-up. Huge accidents tend to occur in rain or fog – the low-visibility tricking drivers into thinking other cars are further away than they really are. Throwing everything into darkness, Lim’s novel forces its characters, and the reader, to crane forward, to squint their eyes, to try get their bearings, just to keep from crashing. And all of this happens after an off-stage break-up. Continue reading “Fog & Car”

This boldly titled collection is split into cleverly named sections, such as “everything before us,” “in spite of everything,” and “the end of everything,” so that we immediately get the impression that we will be taken through a giant landscape of image and emotion. However, we are misled in the scope; the landscape presented is largely personal, the everything particular to her universe. The titular poem suggests she will relate the universe to ourselves, not that the universe (or perhaps more specifically, string theory) is a metaphor for our lives, which is perhaps more the case with these poems. Continue reading “a theory of everything”

These ancient Japanese poems, translated by Rexroth and selected by Eliot Weinberger, are mostly about love, and one who has never loved would be well advised to avoid them. The heartache in many of them is palpable, both through imagery and direct statement. Several, though, are nature poems keenly observed, as in this one by Fujiwara No Sueyoshi (1152-1211): Continue reading “Written on the Sky”

Dear Reader, Continue reading “Dear Apocalypse”

Candida Lawrence’s fourth collection of memoirs feels real and honest. From the opening chapter on her first college level paper to the closing chapter on her eighty-four-year-old sister’s unpredictable romance, Lawrence seems to tell it how it is, although she considers herself “the one in the family who is a veteran embroiderer on reality’s edges.” Continue reading “Vanishing”

Fanny Howe, author of more than two dozen books of fiction and poetry and two collections of essays, comes forth with a poignant new collection of essays in The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. Hers is an idea-driven collection that reveals her pursuit of the writing life, her “vocation that has no name.” The Winter Sun is ultimately a necessary work that finds its own moment in time both by looking back to trace the flight pattern Howe has traversed as an author, and by analyzing the means at which we come to arrive in the present. Continue reading “The Winter Sun”

Do you ever listen to your parents’ advice? Fumitada Naoe, a minority displaced in 1980s-era Japan, certainly tried to. On page 9 of his strange, elliptical, memoir-cum-self-help-book, his mother tells him “Rich people and poor people all eat the same grain of rice. The time given to them is also completely the same. You have an enormous amount of time left. So it’s harder to find a reason for not being able to achieve.” Continue reading “Live with Meaning. Die with Passion.”

This collection of Chinese poems, translated by Kenneth Rexroth and selected by Eliot Weinberger, is review-proof. These poems have endured centuries and still stand as models of economy and beauty. All a reviewer can do is offer excerpts from some of the most memorable of them. Continue reading “Songs of Love, Moon, and Wind”

At a time when many newspapers – if not going out of business altogether – have cut arts coverage, it’s reassuring to see that poet Douglas Holder works as the arts editor for The Somerville News, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a city on the outskirts of Boston and Cambridge. From the Paris of New England is a collection of Holder’s “Off the Shelf” column interviews and Somerville Community Access television show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” interviews with literary figures, many of whom live in this city. The literary luminaries in this volume include Martha Collins, Mark Doty, Timothy Gager, Miriam Levine, Dick Lourie, Afaa Michael Weaver, Marc Widershien, and twenty-two others. Continue reading “From the Paris of New England”

Amelia Gray is not Amelia Grey. Grey writes romance blockbusters with titles like A Duke to Die For, and Gray’s debut AM/PM is anything but a blockbuster. I’m not even sure if it’s a book. It might be an indefinable thing. Continue reading “AM/PM”

Bernardo Atxaga’s latest novel, The Accordionist’s Son, aims to expose the effects that the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath had on the collective conscious of the Basque people. However, it is not a novel of the war, nor is it record of the clandestine resistance that followed. It is a novel of a people and a place, about a way of living life that vanishes as soon as it hits the page. Into this world Atxaga has carefully injected the struggles and sufferings that can befall the oppressed. That he does so without sacrificing any of the everyday beauty that he has found in his people and their land is a testament to his power as a storyteller. Continue reading “The Accordionists Son”