EUROPE CENTRAL William T. Vollmann Viking ($39.95) EXPELLED FROM EDEN A William T. Vollmann Reader Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson, eds. Thunder's Mouth Press ($17.95) a consideration by Justin Taylor I. Where The Sublime is Invoked “Of course I was also practical. As Heidegger writes: The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet […]

Edmund Blair Bolles Joseph Henry Press ($27.95) by James Ervin Though he continued to work on theoretical physics for decades after completing his general theory of relativity in 1915, Einstein's refusal to accept the implications of quantum mechanics, the great physical theory he himself helped create, caused many physicists to label his later years “a […]

Chloé E. Atreya Festina Lente Press ($25) by Jaye Beldo Complex Adaptive Systems (cas) describe the myriad non-linear connections and interdependencies of everything from ecosystems, economies, and genetic codes to species evolution and galactic superclusters. While cas are usually coldly spelled out in calculations, flow charts, and bar graphs that only the scientific elite can fully understand, […]

Ron Silliman Salt Publishing ($14.99) by Mark Tursi Early in Under Albany, Ron Silliman suggests that he has “spent 17 of the last 24 years actively undercutting expectations within form.” This statement seems hardly debatable considering the evolution of his work, spanning from Ketjak (1978) to The Age of Huts (1986) to his newly finished 26 books of The […]

W.G. Sebald Random House ($24.95) by Eric J. Iannelli “…one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre. Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange […]

by Linda Lappin Along a busy stretch of highway north of Rome, near the town of Viterbo, a solitary tower thrusts up among the trees overlooking a deep gorge. This 13th-century tower, known as the tower of Chia, was once the writing studio of Pier Paolo Pasolini, novelist, poet, and filmmaker. Purchased by Pasolini in […]

by Steven Lee Beeber Those who've long suspected Lou Reed might be overstating his importance to the Velvet Underground have two new pieces of evidence to consider: Exhibit A comes in the form of words, a biography of John Cale by Tim Mitchell titled Sedition and Alchemy (Peter Owen Publishers, $34.95); Exhibit B, meanwhile, comes in the […]

by Leonard Schwartz Australian poet John Tranter is the author of many books of poetry including Parallax, The Alphabet Murders, Late Night Radio, Borrowed Voices, and most recently Studio Moon (Salt Publishing, $13.95). He's also the author of a work of fiction, Different Hands, co-editor of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, and the editor of Jacket, one of the world's […]