Marcel Proust translated by Charlotte Mandell Melville House ($10) by Alyssa Pelish In 1908, Parisian society was amused by the court trial of self-proclaimed alchemist Henri Lemoine, whose purported fabrication of ring-sized diamonds duped the De Beers Diamond Syndicate out of nearly 2 million francs. L’affaire Lemoine, as the spectacle came to be known, saw the […]

Amélie Nothomb Translated from the French by Alison Anderson Europa Editions ($15) by Ryan Michael Williams The protagonist of Amélie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée does not believe in love. Twenty-three-year-old Amélie—who shares a first name and many other traits with the novel’s author—was born in Japan to Belgian parents, and has recently taken up residence there for the […]

Ričardas Gavelis translated by Elizabeth Novickas Open Letter Books ($17.95) by Alex Starace As Vilnius Poker begins, the main character, Vytautus Vargalys, has to go to work just like any other citizen in 1970s Lithuania—no matter that he is plagued by sustained paranoia, psychotic visions and flashbacks from nine years spent in a Soviet labor camp. Vargalys […]

Emma Bee Bernstein, Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff, and Nona Willis Aronowitz Belladonna Books ($15) by Ellen Kennedy Michel Rarely has a book been published with as immediate and tragic a backstory as the fourth in the Elder Series published by Belladonna Books, now titled a “Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein.” Daughter of poet Charles Bernstein […]

The Writings of Jack Smith edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell High Risk Books ($16.99) by Spencer Dew “Corniness is the other side of marvelousness,” argues Jack Smith in his breakthrough essay “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez.” Published in Film Culture months before the release of his film Flaming Creatures, the piece champions […]

by David Moscovich David F. Hoenigman is the author of Burn Your Belongings, dubbed by reviewer Gary J. Shipley “an ultra-minimalist work: each page is a paragraph and each paragraph is devoid of proper names, commas, colons, semi-colons, question marks, dialogue and standard capitalization—apart of course from the all important first-person pronoun.” Indeed, the book eschews […]

Kiki Petrosino Sarabande Books ($14.95) by Haines Eason and Jay Thompson Jay Thompson: While the prevailing fashions in poetry are disjunction, ambiguity, text-interpolation, formal experiments, and the interrogation of language-signs, Kiki Petrosino’s debut book is too hungry and exacting for these conversations. This is not to say her poems—about Robert Redford, goat cheese, Orientalism, quibbling lovers, […]

THE NEW NORTH Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland edited by Chris Agee Wake Forest University Press ($19.95) POETS FOR PALESTINE edited by Remi Kanazi Al Jisser Group ($16) by Tim Keane At first glance, the label “the New North” seems an appropriate title for this anthology of contemporary poetry. Since 1998, aside from infrequent killings […]

Kent Johnson Shearsman Books ($16) by Murat Nemet-Nejat just as we come falling into this dreaming: a sky reflected where we are sailing, and where we reach out without reaching the beloved who faces us, and who also is reaching, while we watch the thoughts come, and watch the thoughts go. —Poem for an Anthology […]

by Nate Pritts Henry David Thoreau may not be a name recognizable to everyone—painfully, not everyone has read Walden or Civil Disobedience—but his ideas are ingrained in American culture and have defined so much about how we think of ourselves. They set a benchmark still valid today in terms of what we can aspire to […]