THE LAST KNIGHT NBM ($7.95) LAST DAY IN VIETNAM Dark Horse ($10.95) MINOR MIRACLES DC Comics ($29.95) by Eric Lorberer It's a platitude that has been repeated often, but it bears saying again: Will Eisner is one of the great masters of narrative sequential art, a.k.a. the comics. A generation after pioneers such as Winsor […]
by Thomas P. Kalb I hate to say it, but there aren't many comic books that are worth rereading. Let me hasten to append the fact that I am no literary snob; I have been reading comic books for some thirty-three years, ever since my mother, impressed by my dedication to the Adam West […]
Gene Santoro Oxford University Press ($30) by Jon Rodine Although Charles Mingus died in January of 1979, in twenty-one years he hasn't lost momentum. Groups like the Mingus Big Band are still out there, playing nothing but his music, and there are still brand new albums (most recently "Pussycat Dues" by singer Kevin Mahogany, and […]
Hilary Spurling HarperCollins ($20) by Nathan Leslie Hilary Spurling's new biography, La Grande Thérèse, is partially a footnote to her fecund The Unknown Matisse, a work that cast new and revealing light onto the early modernist painter. Where the undercurrent of The Unknown Matisse was heroism and dignity, Spurling's latest biography is a bon-bon of deceit, a tale of a […]
Dana Sachs Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill ($22.95) by Brian Foye Single, female, American, born in the 1960s and so too young for any first-hand experience with the American war in Vietnam: these rough facts function as a scaffold for Dana Sachs's experiences in Vietnam. Her new memoir, The House on Dream Street, speaks in an […]
edited by the editors of Lingua Franca University of Nebraska Press ($23.95) by Doug Nufer Growing up with superhero comics, I used to wonder why one of their standard plot devices, the hoax, seldom occurred in the real world. Then came Vietnam, a swirl of assassinations, Watergate, and the CIA's overthrow of Allende, i.e., ten years of […]
James Atlas Random House ($35) by Eric J. Iannelli Saul Bellow has certainly reserved a place for himself in the literary Valhalla. His novels helped re-define American literature after WWII—an influence that won him two National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize (1975), and the Nobel Prize (1976). His success was largely a mix of good […]
edited by Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall with Brigitte Berg The MIT Press / Brico Press ($39.95) by Kelly Everding Certain books unveil the marvelous, offering those that encounter them a glimpse into strange new worlds. Such an experience is guaranteed to readers of Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé. Anyone who thinks the love […]
Herbert Marder Cornell University Press ($35) by Carolyn Kuebler In his "Prelude" to The Measure of Life, Herbert Marder tells a story about his "somewhat offbeat" decision, as a graduate student at Columbia in the '60s, to write his thesis on Virginia Woolf's novels. Woolf, who wasn't yet part of the standard college syllabus, was also […]
Kim Addonizio Boa Editions ($12.95) by Sean Thomas Dougherty Kim Addonizio's third collection continues the dialectic of urban despair—the dialogue between bar room and beauty, between sorrow songs and simple prayers—that has earned her a wide readership and many honors. Addonizio's poems depict a landscape of failed relationships, drunken lovers, and barroom drawl. She creates […]