by Tony Magistrale In an interview I conducted with Stephen King a few years ago, he mentioned that when he and his wife Tabitha graduated from the University of Maine, Orono, in 1970, they debated to which part of the state they should move in order to begin their family and careers. Tabitha argued for […]
THE FLAME ALPHABET Ben Marcus Knopf ($25.95) by Robert M. Detman Ben Marcus, a celebrated young novelist who is an associate professor of literature at Columbia University, has received numerous awards and recognition for his innovative contributions to contemporary literature, including an NEA Fellowship and multiple Pushcart Prizes. He is notorious for a 2005 Harper’s essay, […]
Chan KoonchungTranslated by Michael S. DukePreface by Julia Lovell Doubleday ($26.95) by Lucas Klein The cover screams “The Book No One in China Dares to Publish,” the Financial Times and The Observer have offered ad-like reviews, and copies have spilled off bookstore displays in Hong Kong and London for months; The Fat Years is the new must-have for the politically […]
Thomas P. Balázs Aqueous Books ($14) by Weston Cutter If you’re a fan of straightforward, character-driven stories, Thomas Balázs’s Omicron Ceti III, despite its seemingly sci-fi title, is right up your alley. The title story, for example, takes place in a mental institution and features a depressed narrator who is obsessed with the number three and […]
Susan Sherman Counterpoint ($25) by Malcolm Forbes Berta, a haughty young girl employed as companion to the daughter in a prominent Moscow family, finds her services are no longer required and is sent home. To get there she must travel two days by train, from Greater Russia to Little Russia—namely the Ukraine. Gone is the […]
Emily McVarish Granary Books by Afton Wilky In A Thousand Several, Emily McVarish explores the space of a book through its relations to cityscapes. As if she has positioned her reader at a busy intersection, each page becomes a place that text and image move into and out of. In this way, the experience of reading A […]
Charles Russell Prestel ($65) by Eliza Murphy All experience lodges within us—states of ecstasy and despair, what we absorb with our senses, and the bombardment of delight and conflict imposed on us by our cultural milieu. Our psyches mysteriously absorb this barrage of stimulus, and then combine the effects and impacts with genetic matter to […]
Martín Espada W.W. Norton & Company ($24.95) by J. D. Schraffenberger The title poem of Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball is dedicated to the poet’s father, Frank Espada, who is pictured on the cover of the book as a young ballplayer in 1947, his leg kicked high, his arm reaching back with the ball mid-pitch, as though it’s […]
Peter Gizzi Wesleyan University Press ($22.95) by M. D. Snediker “The Grass inside the song / stains me”: Quoddity’s quiddity Readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne undoubtedly will hear in the title of Peter Gizzi’s new collection the vibrant affective discombobulations that Hawthorne attached to threshold spaces. In his uncompleted The Dolliver Romance, Hawthorne writes, “I linger at the […]
Karen Rigby Ahsahta Press ($17.50) by Rebecca Farivar Karen Rigby shares the title of her new book, Chinoiserie, winner of the Ahsahta Press 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, with objects. Chinoiserie refers to a mixture of European and Chinese design aesthetics that combines the delicate blue porcelain of China with the love of the lavish that […]