Jason Fantagraphics Books ($12.95) by Yves Reisender I dislike animal comics. It has always seemed unfair to me that we humans insist on imposing our own sloppy, inelegant traumas on the innocent lives of lizards or feral cats. At best, these cartoon critters are cynical, at worst obscene or cute to the point of cloying. […]
Pankaj Mishra Picador ($15) by Rasoul Sorkhabi During a recent trip to India, on the flight back from New Delhi to the U.S., I was sitting next to an Indian gentleman, an engineering student in an American university. He came from the Indian state of Bihar. When I asked him, “Is there a famous person […]
Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books ($24) by Robert J. Nebel No one ever said that finding a job in George W. Bush's America was going to be easy, but veteran liberal author Barbara Ehrenreich set out to prove how hard it really is in Bait and Switch. Released last fall to rave reviews and an appearance on […]
Donald P. Dulchinos Weiser Books ($17.95) by Nicole Duclos Increasingly, various biotechnology breakthroughs seem to enable incorporation of technology directly into the body, including the brain. The integration of the individual mind with the information and telecommunication infrastructure marks the formation of a tangible neurosphere. This is the full manifestation of the new species homo […]
David Edmonds & John Eidinow HarperCollins ($25.95) by Allan Vorda Rousseau's Dog, a book with a strange title, is the fascinating reconstruction of an argument between two of the greatest thinkers of the 18th century: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. How this argument evolved from a satiric letter mocking Rousseau and snowballed across the intellectual […]
E.H. Gombrich translated by Caroline Mustill Yale University Press ($25) by Kelly Everding "What was he? The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way—and so did I." —John Gardner, Grendel Gardner's Grendel is outraged […]
Marlon Brando & Donald Cammell edited and with an Afterword by David Thomson Alfred A. Knopf ($23.95) by Sam Howie At 51, Annie Doultry is a Scottish-born, American-reared sailor and arms trader much tougher than his name implies. His collaborating creators, in spite of sometimes murky prose and overly convenient plot elements, offer an exciting […]
Mati Unt translated by Eric Dickens Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95) by Scott Esposito In this review of celebrated Estonian author Mati Unt's Things in the Night, I'm not going to attempt anything so foolish as a plot summary—to do so would be contrary to the spirit of Unt's book. But in order to provide some idea […]
Elias Khoury translated by Humphrey Davies Archipelago Books ($26) by Laird Hunt Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, marvelously translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies, is far from the only fictional or poetic treatment of the events following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war—dubbed "the catastrophe" by the Palestinians—but it is certainly one of the grandest. Two […]
David Rosen and Joel Weishaus North Atlantic Books ($14.95) by Andrew Redhead The Healing Spirit of Haiku is a book of reflections and haiku by two writers, accompanied by illustrations by Arthur Okamura that enhance the physical reality of the haiku experience. The authors explain it as "a haibun of the psyche. . .concerning specific themes […]