Tag Archives: FALL 2015

Homage to LeRoi Jones and Other Early Works

Kathy Acker Gabrielle Kappes, editor Center for the Humanities ($8) by Spencer Dew “Immediacy,” for Kathy Acker, was an aesthetic move and a political tactic. She used the term to describe both art that moves its audience and for the insurgent potential within such art—its use value as a tool for revolution. In two of […]

Let Me Tell You

Shirley Jackson Random House ($30) by Rob Kirby Shirley Jackson has always been an anomaly. Her works range from the dark worlds of her timeless short story "The Lottery" and gothic novels like The Haunting of Hill House (1959), to the warm and funny domestic stories she wrote mostly for women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping […]

The Hole of Hypocrisy: A Conversation with Kent Johnson on the U.S. “Avant-Garde” and Other Fictions

by Michael Boughn For anyone paying even the remotest attention to the U.S. poetry scene over the last twenty years, Kent Johnson needs no introduction. Described variously by certain parties as “thuggish,” “an unchained pit bull tossed in a schoolyard,” “a troublemaker,” and “criminal,” and by others as the “gadfly we deserve,” “refreshingly disturbing,” “preeminent,” […]

Burning Down George Orwell’s House

Andrew Ervin Soho Press ($25.95) by Tina Karelson Andrew Ervin’s Burning Down George Orwell’s House, a novel of creative-class angst, comes to readers ingeniously wrapped in a travelogue. Ray Welter, a marketing savant at a Chicago ad agency, has lost his marriage and his peace of mind to cynicism and alcohol. Obsessed since college with […]

The Anchoress

Robyn Cadwallader Sarah Crichton Books ($26) by Nicola Koh Much of The Anchoress takes place in a room—the only door nailed shut, just two windows opening into a church for communication and supplies, the only adornment a crucifix—but the novel’s scope is sweeping; Robyn Cadwallader’s novelistic debut is a captivating and provocative masterpiece. In 1255, […]

Jeremiah's Ghost

Isaac Constantine MP Publishing ($9.99) by Jason Bock There's no reason for a supernatural being to stay in one place for very long. A spirit, a ghost, a disembodied soul—however you want to conceive of it—would most likely hop around and meander through the Universe, perhaps in search of some grand epiphany about existence. In […]

The Land Has Its Say

Henry Lyman Open Field Press ($17) by Rebecca Hart Olander After a lifetime of editing, translating, and championing the poetry of others, Henry Lyman gets his own moment in the sun with The Land Has Its Say. The cover photograph of a dirt road winding through an open landscape is an eloquent visual map of […]

Expect Delays

Bill Berkson Coffee House Press ($16.95) by Joshua Preston There are few poets writing today with the range and talent of Bill Berkson. The author of more than thirty books of poetry, collaborations, and criticism, his latest volume—Expect Delays—is typical of Berkson’s work in that there is nothing typical about it. One finds here Dante-inspired […]

Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre

Edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson University of Michigan Press ($29.95) by Mark Gustafson It’s high time that we had a book on Anne Carson, one of our most important and anomalous writers. Rather than collecting already-published pieces, editor Joshua Marie Wilkinson solicited “appreciations, readings, investigations, experiments, and performances” from a variety of writers, knowing that […]