Jesper Juul The MIT Press ($35) by James Ervin Film became accepted as an object of academic study in the 1960s, approximately 70 years after the first public screenings. In contrast, video games are being studied in universities only a few decades after the 1970 release of Computer Space, the first commercial game. The rapid […]
Etel Adnan City Lights Books ($14.95) by Kim Jensen Etel Adnan, perhaps the most significant Arab-American writer since Gibran Khalil Gibran, is the author of many important works, including The Arab Apocalypse, The Indian Never Had a Horse, and a haunting portrayal of the Lebanese Civil War, Sitt Marie Rose. Ever the itinerant poet/artist, she has, for five […]
William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg City Lights Books ($13.95) By Mark Terrill After three years of self-imposed exile in Mexico City, culminating in the accidental shooting of his wife in the notorious “William Tell” incident, William Burroughs—strung out on junk and at the end of a long streak of bad luck—skipped bail and left the […]
Theodora Goss Prime Books ($24.95) by Rudi Dornemann With any non-realist fiction, there’s an interpretive temptation to read fantasy elements as masks which simultaneously represent and disguise some psychological or political apparatus, masks behind which the story’s “real meaning” hides. The best of the newer fantasists, like Kelly Link or Jeff VanderMeer, are adept at […]
Trinie Dalton Akashic ($13.95) by Ed Taylor Penned by the likes of Jill McCorkle and Ben Marcus, blurbs for Trinie Dalton’s first book, Wide Eyed, feature phrases such as “wonderfully eccentric” and “wholly unique and memorable.” However, as with many books, there appears to be a “blurb gap” between the content and its characterization on the […]
Barbara Henning Spuyten Duyvil ($14.95) by Kris Lawson You’re sitting in a train station or an airport, waiting. Uninterested in the reading material in your hands, you instead spend your time gazing at the people around you in tiny, furtive glances. Why does that man wear sweatpants and dress shoes? Where is the eerily silent […]
Bathsheba Monk Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($22) by William Bush The fictional town of Cokesville, Pennsylvania, is the real main character of Bathsheba Monk’s first book, and such a portrayal seems overdue. Most people who haven’t had the pleasure of the state’s long, winding, constantly under-construction turnpike tend to think of the stretch between Pittsburgh […]
Daniel Borzutzky Triple Press ($15.28) by Christian TeBordo It’s hard to say just how “arbitrary” the tales in Daniel Borzutzky’s first collection really are—the title begs to be taken ironically, and the first piece, “The History of Rights,” obliges. In it, the characters, all “brutal ruffians,” rough one another up, chanting “My lord is a […]
edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan Omnidawn ($19.95) by Alan DeNiro This anthology, as its subtitle “Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction” suggests, attempts to map a peculiar space in its pages. A gigantic tome over 600 pages long, it seeks to bring together all sorts of non-realistic literature under one […]
Colin MacInnes Allison & Busby (£10.99) by Douglas Messerli Montgomery Pew, an innocent underling in the government bureaucracy, is suddenly named assistant-welfare officer of the colonial department. No one, including himself, knows how he has gotten the job, but taking his new position seriously, he “sallies forth” to inspect the welfare hostel—after meeting Johnny Macdonald […]