Tag Archives: Summer 2019

Friedrich Hölderlin:
Selected Poems and Letters

Friedrich Hölderlin translated by Christopher Middleton The Last Books ($27) by Patrick James Dunagan The work of German poet and singular visionary Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) embodies the essence of the poet-as-seer. His ethereally divined poetic compositions manifest themselves primarily in regard to the individual’s engagement with the natural world, albeit telescoped beyond the confining lens […]

Sleep in a Strange House

Jessica Purdy Nixes Mate Books ($9.95) by Douglas Cole There’s a beautiful mystery in Jessica Purdy’s poetry collection Sleep in a Strange House—it’s like we’re traveling through her dreams or watching a surrealist movie, the meaning of which lies just out of reach. Take the opening poem, “Architect,” for example, in which the poet creates […]

Between Two Millstones
Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn translated by Peter Constantine University of Notre Dame Press ($35) by Jeff Bursey The Publishers Weekly review of Between Two Millstones calls its author “a onetime giant in the world of letters.” There are indeed few figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008); among his major achievements, the three-volume The Gulag Archipelago revealed to the […]

Talk Across Water:
Stories Selected and New

Merrill Gilfillan Flood Editions ($17.95) by Garin Cycholl After running into an old acquaintance in a northern diner, the narrator in Merrill Gilfillan’s “Landscape with Frog” sets up the problem. He asks, “As I drove from town, the epistemological vertigo hit me. My God, I thought, how does it all keep going? How does the […]

Sly Bang

Larissa Shmailo Spuyten Duyvil ($18) by Jefferson Hansen Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is written with tremendous energy and moves at an exhilarating pace, yet it dwells on depraved characters and actions. Almost nobody is nice in this novel about serial killers, mad scientists, FBI agents and evildoers. The plot centers around Nora, an FBI agent […]

The City in the Middle of the Night

Charlie Jane Anders Tor ($26.99) by Chris Barsanti As far as unfair comparisons go, a blurb like “this generation’s Le Guin” on a dustjacket is pretty high up there. That doesn’t mean that a gloriously rich voice such as Charlie Jane Anders, author of 2017’s prizewinning All the Birds in the Sky, does not deserve […]

Siblings: Four Recent Poetry Titles
from Singapore’s Math Paper Press

by Greg Bem Based out of Singapore’s independent bookstore BooksActually, Math Paper Press is a cornerstone in the publication of Singaporean and Southeast Asian literature, its catalog featuring a blend of diverse poetry and prose titles by many individuals. The press and its collection bring new and emerging voices into one place and one canon, […]