Tariq Ramadan Oxford University Press ($12.95) by Spencer Dew In a 2003 television exchange with then French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the controversial theologian Tariq Ramadan called for a moratorium on the Islamic practice of stoning adulterous women to death. “Are you serious?” Sarkozy responded, “A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a […]

Michel Sanouillet revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet translated by Sharmila Ganguly MIT Press ($39.95) by Jay Besemer Anyone would think that the English-speaking world had just discovered Dada. A carnival of attention—both scholarly and otherwise—has been pitched around the international Dada movement over the past decade, resulting in an apparently accelerating Tilt-a-Whirl of Dada-oriented […]

Ted Gioia Speck Press ($25) by Rebecca Morales In The Birth and Death of the Cool, Ted Gioia claims that the social aesthetic of “cool” is going out of style. Gioia, primarily a jazz historian and cultural observer, brings his experience to this theory. The book is conversational and simple, but packed with history and business […]

D. Harlan Wilson Guide Dog Books ($14.95) by Andy Stewart As a self-proclaimed irrealist, a pioneer of critifiction, and an author of “ultraviolent” tendency, D. Harlan Wilson is an entrenched participant in the postmodern (or post-postmodern) science-fiction milieu. He situates himself as no stranger to the narratives explicated in his first book of critical theory, Technologized […]

Rebecca K. O’Connor Red Hen Press ($18.95) by Jessica Handler When I was young, I drew figures that combined girls with birds. I couldn’t manage humans; wings and beaks were simpler than bodies and faces. In her memoir Lift, Rebecca O’Connor proves that both are complicated, as she deftly defines one woman—herself—through her bond with a […]

Mekkawi Said translated by Adam Talib American University in Cairo Press ($22.95) by M. Lynx Qualey Author Nicholas Delbanco has said that one could precisely sculpt a friend in prose—describing her personal tics, her physical features, her history—and chances are she’d never notice. Give a character your friend’s name, however, and she’ll be sure to see […]

Karen Maitland Delacorte Press ($26) by Spencer Dew That certain British and Irish churches have Sheela na Gigs carved above their doors—so-called Divine Hags crouching so as to spread the lips of their exaggerated, massive labia—is, as with much of such history, a mystery, and one into which no end of theories has been thrust. […]

Orhan Pamuk translated by Maureen Freely Knopf ($28.95) by Joshua Willey “Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.” So Kemel, the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s new novel The Museum of Innocence, tells the author, who characteristically shows up in the work’s final sequence to explain his own relationship to his subjects. Kemel’s sentiment […]

Wang Gang translated by Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan Penguin ($15) by Lucas Klein English is a coming-of-age novel. As such, it hits many of the notes familiar to this most English of literary forms (its precursor, thebildungsroman, has more stringently German requirements): a boy grows up, learns about love, separates from his parents, takes […]

Stacia Saint Owens Livingston Press ($15.95) by Charles Dodd White There’s blood and bile but also weird beauty in Stacia Saint Owens's debut collection of short stories, Auto-Erotica. In stark, surreal evocations of the damaged and rapidly imploding dystopia commonly called Southern California, Saint Owens reveals the macabre through narrative dream states in which the grotesque […]