Philipp Blom The Overlook Press ($27.95) by Allison Slavick The phenomenon of collecting has been documented for around 500 years. Early on there were reliquaries, studiolos, and the Kunstschrank, an ornamental piece of furniture with multiple drawers filled with objects that were metaphors for life. Then came the cabinets of curiosities that documented the freaky […]
André Breton Translated by Simon Watson Taylor MFA Publications ($29.95) by Jay Besemer Autumn 2002 saw a strange conjunction in the art world. In November, it was announced that André Breton's collection of Surrealist and indigenous paintings and objects would be put up for auction. Coincidentally, the publishing arm of the Museum of Fine Arts […]
Ray Bradbury William Morrow & Company ($24.95) by Ryder Miller Once touted as "the worlds greatest living science fiction writer," Ray Bradbury remains one of the best writers of short genre fiction, having successfully written short stories in the fantasy, science fiction, horror, and detective traditions. Bradbury got past the boundaries of genre writing when […]
Sherman Alexie Grove Press ($24) by Anne Bergen-Aurand and Brian Bergen-Aurand "That's Sherman, not Shaman." At a reading for this new short story collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Alexie responded to a question with that quip. While it garnered the laugh it was obviously meant to, it also conveyed a serious message, one […]
Yasmina Khadra Translated by Linda Black The Toby Press ($19.95) by Kevin Carollo How can you forget when you spend your time betraying your memory, and your nights trying to piece it together again like a cursed jigsaw, only for it to go hazy again when dawn comes, over and over again. Every day. Every […]
Jonathan Lethem Doubleday ($26) by Eric Lorberer Holding up Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March as the Great American Novel, Martin Amis praises the book's "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity. In these pages the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow's prose. Everything is in here, […]
The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem Doubleday ($26) by Eric Lorberer Holding up Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March as the Great American Novel, Martin Amis praises the book's "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity. In these pages the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow's prose. […]
Michel Houellebecq Translated by Frank Wynne Knopf ($25) by Joel Turnipseed If the pure product of America is insanity, what have we gotten from the French—le petite mort and the bitter rant? Michel Houllebecq has again combined the two in Platform, his follow-up to 2000's import, The Elementary Particles. The story starts with the death […]
The Silver Gryphon Edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern Golden Gryphon Press ($27.95) Angel Body And Other Magic for the Soul Edited by Chris Reed and David Memmott Back Brain Recluse / Wordcraft of Oregon ($16.95) by Alan DeNiro Recently there has been a bumper crop of strong original anthologies (that is, with no […]
by Chris McCreary Craig Watson's "Statement," published in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, addresses how he was initially attracted to Language writing because he felt a "camaraderie of others similarly set adrift" in search of means of writing challenging work, yet soon found himself "processing through an increasingly narrow channel of thought" in "an environment controlled more […]