Tag Archives: summer 2009

LANGUAGE FOR A NEW CENTURY: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond

edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar W.W. Norton ($27.95) by Craig Santos Perez Not since Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems for the Millennium has there been an anthology of such impressive scope. Six years in the making, Language For a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond weighs in at almost 800 […]

PRAIRIE STYLE

C. S. Giscombe Dalkey Archive ($12.95) by Paula Koneazny C. S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style, which won a 2008 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, is the final book in a four-part series that began with the limited edition book Two Sections from Practical Geography (Diaeresis Press) followed by Here (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994) and Giscome Road (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998). Prairie […]

ON MOVING: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again

Louise DeSalvo Bloomsbury ($22) by Suzann Clemens To corroborate an unexpected sense of loss experienced in a move from her home of thirty years, Louise DeSalvo embarks on a journey of healing. The outcome is the author’s latest memoir, On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again. Through a close […]

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS WRONG: The Retail Chronicles

edited by Jeff Martin Soft Skull Press ($12.95) by Sarah Salter Ever wonder if the electronics geeks are laughing as you wander lost among the plasma TVs? They are. In The Customer Is Always Wrong, Jeff Martin collects twenty-one retail worker perspectives; those going door-to-door share space with veteran shop owners and teenage cashiers. Unfortunately, many […]

REASON, FAITH, AND REVOLUTION: Reflections on the God Debate

Terry Eagleton Yale University Press ($25) by Emy Farley English Literature and Cultural Theory professor Terry Eagleton is a bold man. The highly decorated literary critic begins his latest book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by brazenly admitting “since the only theology I don’t know much about is Christian theology, as opposed […]

THE YAMBO OUOLOGUEM READER: The Duty of Violence, A Black Ghostwriter's Letter to France, and The Thousand and One Bibles of Sex

Yambo Ouologuem translated and edited by Christopher Wise Africa World Press ($34.95) by Spencer Dew In 1968—the year of the Paris Uprising—Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem found fame with the publication of his novel Le Devoir de Violence, an African epic drenched in blood, chronicling a history of cruelty and human treachery. The book, thick with assassinations, […]

JAN KEROUAC: A Life in Memory

edited by Gerald Nicosia Noodlebrain Press ($21.95) by Mark Spitzer The only child of Jack Kerouac, Jan Kerouac lived a colorful and chaotic life. She was a raven-haired, blue-eyed beauty who shot heroin at thirteen, became a prostitute, surpassed her father in globetrotting goofery, and published poetry, fiction, and two memoirs: Baby Driver (St. Martin’s, 1981) and Trainsong (Henry […]

ANCIENT SHORE: Dispatches from Naples

Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller University of Chicago Press ($13) by Douglas Messerli In her beautifully written apologia for Naples and the Campania region, author Shirley Hazzard begins her “dispatches” with a differentiation between traveling to a country, merely living in another country, and a stay of pilgrimage. The first, no matter how rich the experience […]

CONQUEST OF THE USELESS: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog translated by Krishna Winston Ecco ($24.99) by Scott Bryan Wilson “My life seems like a stranger’s house to me,” writes Werner Herzog late in Conquest of the Useless, less a straightforward diary of 1979-81, when he was working on Fitzcarraldo, than a series of “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” The film […]

NOTES FROM NO MAN’S LAND: American Essays

Eula Biss Graywolf Press ($15) by Scott F. Parker No Man’s Land was a nickname for “the sparsely populated place between the city of Chicago and the city of Evanston, the place just north of the boundary that once designated Indian Territory, a place where the streets were unpaved and unlighted.” In Notes from No Man’s […]