Discover news from independent publishers and university presses including new titles, events, and more.
It says on the “About the Author” page at the back of Persephone that “Lyn Lifshin has written more than 120 books.” I want to read all of them. Here is not only a prolific but gifted and generous poet. In Persephone alone, Lifshin offers 189 poems, every one of them skillfully crafted and emotionally resonant. Some of them are overwhelming. Continue reading “Persephone”
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”
Keith Ratzlaff would like some answers. Or perhaps he would like a world that didn’t need so much explaining. This collection of anecdotes and meditations, despite not being dramatically questioning, still seem to present the ghost of “I don’t know why, do you?” From stories of misbehaving, fighting relatives to portraits of paintings in Amsterdam, a current of surprise runs through the plain text and action that reminds us that there are things worth knowing before we pass judgment on our neighbors. Continue reading “Then, a Thousand Crows”
In Arisa White’s debut collection, A Disposition for Shininess, family eclipses mere flesh and blood. Siblings are a unit that both torture and uplift one another, come what may in the strange universe of adults. White’s observations of family dynamics gain interpretive momentum as the reader progresses through this slim volume of nine poems. Continue reading “A Disposition for Shininess”
Drift and Swerve, Samuel Ligon’s second book and winner of the 2008 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, takes its title from the second piece in the collection, a road trip story about a family traveling behind a drunk driver as they return home after visiting their dying grandmother. While the family bickers, the drunk driver grows more erratic, weaving across the road, first lazily and then desperately, before wrecking the car into an enormous concrete ditch. Each family member reacts differently to the nearly fatal accident: the mother cradles the injured drunk’s head against her body to comfort him; the father weakly stands to the side with a blanket, pretending to offer help; and the children, disappointed because the man is not dead, go sliding through the mud “as if it were winter and the drainage ditch a frozen over river.” Continue reading “Drift and Swerve”
I read the opening scene of The Conqueror, the second novel in a trilogy by the Norwegian writer Jan Kjærstad, with relief. The trilogy depicts the life of Jonas Wergeland, an ordinary boy from an undistinguished Oslo neighborhood, who rises to national and even international fame as a television personality. In the 600 pages of the first novel in the series, The Seducer, we read of Jonas’s travels, triumphs, and yes, seductions (there are many, from a beautiful and accomplished cast of women to, eventually, an entire nation transfixed by his documentaries). Jonas is equipped with a magic penis, a set of memorized quotations from books he hasn’t read, a silver thread in his spine, a crystal prism in his pocket, and an unerring eye for great art. He can’t go wrong. The Seducer is a vast and undeniably ambitious novel, but also, in its unremitting catalog of the successes of its hero, a little wearying. Continue reading “The Conqueror”
The mosquito season never seems to end in Sri Lanka; the swarms, “deadly as flying needles,” are always lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike. Frequently referenced as a harbinger of death and strife, the image of the mosquito figures prominently in Mosquito, Roma Tearne’s eloquent and moving novel of love in war-torn Sri Lanka. Continue reading “Mosquito”
Timothy Green’s debut collection of verse, American Fractal, is named for the concept of order existing within what appears to be randomness that mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot developed in fractal geometry. Although his new way of perceiving relationships has revolutionized modern science, initially others were not able to “see” what Mandelbrot discerned and represented in unconventional mathematical formulas. As a poet, Green also challenges readers to see with him the patterns he has discovered and recreated in this aptly named collection of fifty poems in five sections. Continue reading “American Fractal”
Daniel Allen Cox is brilliant with a picaresque vignette. He bobs and weaves through Shuck, throwing glimpses at the porn industry, New York City, gay sex and literary magazine submissions with steady grace, floating through the voice of Jaeven Marshall, aka the new Boy New York: Continue reading “Shuck”
Toward the end of her memoir, the richly titled Me As Her Again, Nancy Agabian writes: Continue reading “Me As Her Again”
Brenda Webster’s new novel, Vienna Triangle, employs the historical context of the early psychoanalysis movement to create a mystery that explores the dark side of intellectual enlightenment. Using Freud and his inner circle as case studies, she investigates the rise of egoism and the tension of professional ambition within the group. Like most historical fiction that focuses on intellectual movements and figures, Vienna Triangle plays largely on the relationship between ideology and character that exists whenever you have someone trying to change our cultural perspective. Continue reading “ViennaTriangle”
On the surface, First Execution by Domenico Starnone is a novel about terrorism, filled with the requisite twists and turns that are the driving force of a crime thriller. Yet, it’s also a metafictional narrative reminiscent of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, becoming a text on the act of writing and editing, switching from protagonist to author, and back again. Continue reading “First Execution”
The nameless narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel, The Bathroom, takes up residence in his bathroom and refuses to leave, while others attend to him and try in vain to coax him from the bathtub, where he cultivates the “quietude of [his] abstract life.” The premise brings to mind Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, the 19th-Century Russian nobleman who does not get out of bed for the first 150 pages of the novel. However, while The Bathroom is no satire, neither does Toussaint weigh it down with seriousness. Continue reading “The Bathroom”
In the geology of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s career and development as a writer, his third novel, Camera, is easily placed in the same strata as his debut, The Bathroom. However, Camera is funnier and more romantic (in the nameless narrator’s weird way). The book opens: Continue reading “Camera”
This novel doesn’t cross lines. It blurs them. What first seems to be a flaw on the part of the author turns out to be the intention. Last Night in Montreal subtly breaks boundaries throughout, whether through aspects of the plot or the ways in which it was written. Because of this, the words get under our skin, making us feel as if something is off, but we are still urged, through Mandel’s words, to keep reading and to push past the discomfort that looms on every page. Continue reading “Last Night in Montreal”
Join me, please, in trotting out an old chestnut to roast over the open fire of winter passing. I'm talking about that oldie-but-goodie, "Can't judge a book by its cover" chestnut. Roast it. Crack it open and spread it on your melba toast. Because that chestnut lies to you sometimes, and certainly is lying to you if you're staring at the cover of S.L. Wisenberg's The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. I know. It's nearly spring. We don't want to think about cancer right now. We'd rather not be bitches. But join me for just a moment, please, and help me contemplate this cover. We've got the title, for one, emblazoned over an oddly appealing, oddly alarming photograph of a papier-mâché figure of Wisenberg (presumably) complete with flaunted hero-cape, peace-sign earrings, cancer-cropped hair, and defiant red circle with a bar through it smack over the place you'd expect her left breast. Continue reading “The Adventures of Cancer Bitch”
Ralph Waldo Emerson never wrote an essay on writing. The closest he ever came to it was “The Poet,” a work that inspired Uncle Walt to write Leaves of Grass. However, Emerson was far from silent on the issue. Careful excavation of his works reveals numerous thoughts on the writing craft. But rather than combing through everything Emerson wrote, you might start with First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. Robert D. Richardson’s new book excavates these gems of wisdom for any writer aspiring to refine their own art. And it wouldn’t hurt to learn from Richardson’s own crisp, erudite, and unfussy prose, a style sure to have met Emerson’s approval. Continue reading “First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process”
The term “accessible” has had its fair usage in poetry reviews, and I’ll use it here to describe Paul Hostovsky‘s Bending the Notes, a selection for the Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Poetry Series. Hostovsky‘s poems require no specialized knowledge of literary tradition or poetics. Set against the working-class suburbs of Boston, a milieu of duplexes and bowling alleys, populated by aggressive drivers and girls named “Cece Santucci,” these poems speak of parenting, childhood, love, and writing. Hostovsky‘s diction is colloquial and his tone, intimate. Often narrative, his lines unfold meditatively and lyrically to empathetic moments that illustrate commonplace, human struggles. One can see why poems from this collection with their abundance of emotional forthrightness were featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Continue reading “Bending the Notes”
Jackie Corley’s debut story collection, The Suburban Swindle, features a blurb that says, “Stories like poetry made from the gritty stuff of hard scrabble life.” It’s not often that a book blurb is all that honest or accurate. Hyperbolized and syrupy? Yes, almost always. But capturing the essence of the book in a line or two is indeed rare, and refreshing. This blurb definitely captures the essence. Corley’s characters do live hard, gritty lives. They live in a perpetual moment where things are always about to ignite, or burn out, or both – relationships are going to end, friends and lovers are going to leave – giving each story the sense that it takes place on the edge of a cliff. Continue reading “The Suburban Swindle”
The year is 1963. Yolanda and Fiona have already been friends for two weeks, and Yolanda is in the hospital because some thugs came looking for Fiona’s brother’s stash of drugs. The two aren’t supposed to be friends. Yolanda is black, Fiona is white. But here they are, and Fiona is helping Yolanda escape from the hospital before they release her. Yolanda wants to run away before her mother arrives, her mother who is traveling up from South Carolina, where she lives now, and who is planning to take Yolanda back to South Carolina to live with her. So the two girls sneak out of the hospital, where a distressed woman asks them to watch her dog so she can take her son to see her dying mother. And this is how their adventure begins. Continue reading “Morning in a Different Place”
Jenny Pritchett’s characters in At or Near the Surface live lives that, on the surface, would seem comfortable, secure, normal – lives that are generally good enough. But Pritchett opens the heads and hearts of these women to find that, in one way or another, they feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied with their lives. They long, they hurt, they are hungry. Whether they find themselves cycling through an unbreakable daily routine, at the crumbling edge of an unhappy marriage, unable to appease the stalking guilt from their past, or dealing with the surreal grief of a miscarriage, each of Pritchett’s characters must decide what they will or will not do with the rest of their lives. Continue reading “At or Near the Surface”
Half way through Light Boxes Shane Jones drops his fiction mask. He pulls us back into reality. He gives us a list: Continue reading “Light Boxes”
In this sequel to Blue, Joyce Moyer Hostetter’s award-winning tale of a young white girl’s battle with polio and her friendship with a black girl in the hospital where she recuperates, we follow Ann Fay’s struggle to accept her polio-induced disability and the knowledge that she’s different from everybody else. At the same time, her father is suffering post-war psychological trauma. He’s not the same father or husband, and Ann Fay isn’t sure how to cope with his personality change, particularly the threat of violence. Continue reading “Comfort”
In his introspective novella Circulation, Tim Horvath devotes special attention to examining the grey areas of modern life where reality and fantasy often meet and the distance between life and death dwindles. In what would best be described as character self-development, Horvath brings the reader face to face with the narrator Jay's dual preoccupations of family connection and recorded knowledge. The self examining nature of Circulation presents the reader with a sympathetic look at these twin pillars of the protagonist's identity, even as Jay begins to slowly tear them down. Continue reading “Circulation”
Like most families, the Verbicaros are anything but ordinary. Following five generations of a close knit Southern Italian family over the span of a century, The Islands of Divine Music by John Addiego follows the Verbicaros’ journey from Italy’s boot to San Francisco to the Yucatán Peninsula. Along the way, they encounter traces of the sacred and the profane, discovering themselves in the process. Continue reading “The Islandsof Divine Music”
You could say this is a novel about the Holocaust. You could say this is a story about secrets and the past, control and acceptance, love and emptiness. And The White Space Between is all these things, but, above all else, Ami Sands Brodoff has crafted a tale of ancestry and the familial bond. Continue reading “The White Space Between”
Family Secret is an exercise in using whimsical metaphor and sound to illustrate the rather serious business of love's inadequate worldly manifestations. With his quatrains of irreverent, fanciful observations, Murphy draws conclusions about the absurdity of love in the world we've elected to build. Continue reading “Family Secret”
A vague, unnamable danger drives much of the language throughout Howie Good’s Tomorrowland. The narrator speaks of a land in which “bodies in the early stages of decay hang like gray rags from the trees” and authorized personnel instruct evacuees “to wait for the destroying angels to tire and the broken buildings to stop burning.” It seems that the characters of this world cannot escape no matter how carefully they plot: secret police and paid snitches abound, and the whirring ceiling cameras never cease. Continue reading “Tomorrowland”
Nora Eisenberg tackles a touchy topic in When You Come Home – specifically, she writes about the mysterious Gulf War illness that afflicted a quarter of returning soldiers from the Gulf War, but, more generally, she explores the damage that soldiers sustain physically and emotionally during wartime. Continue reading “When You Come Home”
In one of the early poems of Isabella Baladine Howald’s haunting new collection, Secret of Breath, the poet writes, “What I love is not seeing, but the effort of seeing.” This untitled poem’s opening line could easily serve as the book’s Ars Poetica: Howald relentlessly self-interrogates as she scrutinizes the philosophical meaning behind her lover’s/husband’s death (it’s never quite specified who exactly died) – and, by extension, life. Continue reading “Secret of Breath”
Here is an austere and well-made collection which brings to mind a spitfire of phrases, like “German ingenuity” and “high modernism” and the “plasir” of the “illisable texte.” The book shifts its glasses and a-hems a bit before engaging me in a conversation which is charmingly incomprehensible. And despite its attempts to be cordial and funny and warm (okay, maybe not quite warm), I can't quite shake that feeling I used to have when I met my physicist boyfriend for beers after work and he'd start talking about trapping ions with lasers: it was sexy as hell but my eyes glazed over almost immediately – not because it was boring, but because I wasn't smart enough. I admit it: this book raises the presumed-dead spectre of my math fear. It feels clean and masculine and well-groomed and logical and intimidating in a way that made me put off writing this review for months. This isn't easy-going for me, but then, I don't think it's supposed to be. Continue reading “Irresponsibility”
Allison Carter’s book of experimental prose isn’t, as Danielle Dutton suggests in the introduction to the slender volume, “a kind of writing that gets called ‘cross-genre’ because it pulls all the best aspects from poetry and all the best aspects from fiction.” A Fixed, Formal Arrangement is far beyond that in its originality of thought and image as to feel like a new genre altogether; something like a planet and a star colliding, fusing a third heavenly body in the process. No longer a star and a planet, they orbit away – a wondrously altered thing. Continue reading “A Fixed, Formal Arrangement”
Mary Miller’s Big World, the second release from the mini-books division of Hobart: Another Literary Journal, is physically reminiscent of the 1950s-era pulp paperbacks you see stacked around used book stores. If I were older, I imagine that David Kramer’s bright front and back illustrations, the colored edges of the book’s pages, and the book’s small size would remind me of the good old days when I could buy naughty books for ten cents apiece and hide them in my back pocket. Continue reading “Big World”
Although only 106 pages long, Forrest Gander’s first novel is freighted with the emotional complexity and gritty vividness of a heavy-weight book several times as long. Continue reading “As a Friend”
The epigraph from Prince Rogers Nelson (“The beautiful ones always smash the picture”) provides a succinct introduction to the territory Brown mines throughout Please; namely, the intersection of violence and desire. For those who may not recognize his full given name, Prince Rogers Nelson is better known simply as Prince (a.k.a. The Artist Formerly Known As…). It should come as no surprise, given the choice of epigraph, that music is one of the book’s central motifs. Continue reading “Please”
Don’t let the title or shadowy sepia cover fool you; this is not your typical Middle Eastern novel: sad, dark, slow, un-relatable. There are no silent, dark-clad, wise old women or handsome, ruthless, old-fashioned, but still socially respectable young men. The plot isn’t made slow by verbally artistic renditions of the dusty scenery or groups of loyal women milling around the well. The tone is not sad in a “you’ll-never-know-what-it’s-like, feel-sorry-for-the-lot-of-us, but-our-life-is-beautiful,” distant kind of way. Continue reading “The Madwoman of Bethlehem”
Celia, a teacher, writer, and mother in her fifties, undergoes psychoanalysis after nearly being killed by a passing taxi. Finding that she has bottled away years of painful memories, she obsessively engages in her work with Dr. Daniels, to whom she pours out stories and dreams about her mother who committed suicide, her relationship with various members of her extended family, and longing for her grown son who lives across the country. Continue reading “Some Place Quite Unknown”
Ron MacLean, author of the 2004 novel Blue Winnetka Skies, surges forward with his new collection of short stories, Why the Long Face? The collection’s witty, and at times wry, take on the ordinary stuff of life works to subtly reveal the extraordinary nature hidden in even the most common events. Continue reading “Why the Long Face?”
The word “politics” comes from the Latin politicus and means, according to Merriam-Webster, “of or relating to government, a government, or the conduct of government.” It’s the conduct of government – George Bush’s government – that concerns most of the 50 poets collected here. Some are famous; some are new. All are accomplished and impassioned. Continue reading “State of the Union”
On a seemingly ordinary day, Andreas decides to change the course of his life. He’s empty, worn out and sick of life’s routines, but he’s also learned that he may have cancer. Almost immediately, Andreas decides to quit his job, sell his Parisian apartment of 20 years and return to his hometown in Switzerland to visit, and perhaps act upon, an unrequited love. Continue reading “On a Day Like This”
The logic behind the 2×2 series, published by the Feminist Press, goes something like this: selected works by two authors (one male, one female) dealing with a similar theme or subject are juxtaposed in a single book. The blurb on the back of the jacket puts it this way: “Love. Death. Conflict. Civilization and its discontents. Do women and men tackle these enduring themes differently? [2×2] matches short works by great women and men writers and lets you be the judge.” Continue reading “Inventing the Real”
Kyle Buckley’s first book, The Laundromat Essay, is a postmodern mix of poetics, absurd parable and essay. Continue reading “The Laundromat Essay”
Legible Heavens is a difficult book. Not because of any abstruse references or language, but because after examining the long sequences Mr. Hix has strung together, the flow of one image to the next, and the tenuous chains of implication, you may not be sure of what he said. Continue reading “Legible Heavens”
With the stories of Jean Ross Justice, it is moments and images you come away with, details that stay with you long after the stories as a whole have faded. Continue reading “The End of a Good Party and Other Stories”
Dirk Stratton’s new chapbook of poems, A Series/A Sequence, is a throwback of sorts. In an age where E-Books and particularly E-Chaps are abundant due to the explosion of the blogosphere and readily available publishing software, Stratton’s chap is handmade and released in a very limited run. The book is constructed “old-school”: side stapled, stock cover, paper one could find at a neighborhood Kinkos. Rather than seeming fly-by-night and hurried, however, A Series/A Sequence is lovingly made, with beautiful embossed imprints on each cover – notice I do not say the “front” and “back” of the book. A Series/A Sequence is actually two separate suites of poems that are thematically and aesthetically linked. Hold the book one way, one can read through “Capitulation Suite,” which constitutes the Series part of the chap. Flip the book over and one discovers another suite of lyrical, borderline-concrete poems entitled “Laiku,” which makes up the Sequence. In constructing the chap in this manner, NeO Pepper has joined a growing movement of grassroots to make poetry books that are pieces of art as opposed to mass-produced commodity. The pleasures of A Series/A Sequence rest in its construction as much its poetry, though one feels inextricable from the other. Continue reading “A Series/A Sequence”
Everything I know about Iceland could fit into a shoebox: two Björk CDs, a six of Viking beer, a tin of cured ram scrota (a gag gift by one of my “friends”). But I do find the unique and au courant alluring, and my ventures into the unknown often prove worthwhile or at worst innocuous (the only extreme exceptions being Riverdance and Robo-Tripping – I seriously advise you to lay off both, no matter what the cool kids say.) Continue reading “The Pets”
Reading Margaret Christakos’s poetry on the page is like reading sheet music. You don’t get the full effect until you hear it. And when you do hear it, when you read it aloud to yourself, you realize that the music is wildly experimental and takes some participation. Christakos, in What Stirs, challenges you to meet her halfway. There’s nothing passive about these poems. Continue reading “What Stirs”
It was during the decade of the First World War, 1910-1920, that the Imagist poem came to fruition. Imagist poetry was part of the literary revolt in the United States and England against the staid and formal techniques of the nineteenth century. William Pratt, in the introduction to his indispensable anthology The Imagist Poem – Modern Poetry in Miniature, quotes Imagist poet F.S. Flint’s three rules by which the Imagist poem exists: Continue reading “The Imagist Poem”
The Tsar’s Dwarf is Danish author Peter H. Fogtdal’s first novel to be translated into English. Sørine Bentsdatter, Fogtdal’s unusual heroine, is brilliantly rendered. A deformed female dwarf living in the early 18th century, Sørine is wittily acerbic, angry, and indifferent. She’s also shrewd, sensitive, and fiercely intelligent. At times she’s compassionate and almost kind; at others, her actions are questionable, even deplorable. Always, Sørine is human. Continue reading “The Tsar’s Dwarf”
In BC Hall and CT Wood’s travelogue, Big Muddy: Down the Mississippi through America’s Heartland, they claim that the old dividing line between North and South, the Mason-Dixon, is arbitrary and outdated, a relic from a property dispute by two English astronomers in the 1760s. Continue reading “On the Mason Dixon Line:”
