B. H. Fingerman M Press ($12.95) by Jessica Bennett We're all familiar with the legions of sexy, forever-young, brooding vampires that have dominated vampire fiction from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, being immortal loses some of its appeal when you've got to spend eternity working in a cubicle and dining on the dregs […]
Fumiko Hayashi Translated by Lane Dunlop Columbia University Press ($27.50) by Scott Bryan Wilson In November 2005, I saw all thirty-one films in a Mikio Naruse retrospective—among them his 1955 film Floating Clouds, one of many adaptations he did of Fumiko Hayashi's novels. Until recently, very much like Naruse's films, Hayashi's work was impossible to find […]
Jesse Ball and Thordis Björnsdottir Nýhil ($20) by Laird Hunt And out went Vera and Linus with a large knife and a bag, for hunting children's hands. There is probably no better place to begin a brief comment on this strangely sexy, agreeably scary collaborative compendium than with the above image of its two protagonists […]
by Linda Lappin Two Neapolitan clowns, the king of Naples, a shipwreck, an alchemist, and a trunk full of waterlogged pages—sound familiar? Shakespeare's Tempest, you might think, but in this case the "drowned book" is not Prospero's magic tome, but an original manuscript of Shakespeare's sonnets. In his brilliant, fanciful, and deeply moving play "Shakespeare […]
THE BOOK OF MARTYRDOM AND ARTIFICE First Journals and Poems 1937 - 1952 Allen Ginsberg Edited by Bill Morgan and Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton Da Capo Press ($27.50) HOWL ON TRIAL The Battle for Free Expression Edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters City Lights ($14.95) I CELEBRATE MYSELF The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg […]
By William Alexander If Comics were a country, Scott McCloud would be that country's representative to the United Nations. He would sit in a blue chair, wearing his red Zot! T-shirt and his green flannel, and he would consider matters of global and aesthetic importance behind those huge, round eyeglasses. McCloud's comics persona has narrated three nonfiction […]
by Jeanie Chung Gina Frangello knows the fiction industry from all sides: as a writer, executive editor of the fiction magazine Other Voices and founder and executive editor of OV Books, an imprint specializing in short story collections. Her first novel, My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus, 2006), is a contemporary retelling of Freud's case history of "Dora," a […]
Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, José Marzán, Jr., et al. Vertigo by Rudi Dornemann In the nearly twenty years since the debut of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, the comic book series that have followed from DC comics' Vertigo imprint have become almost a genre of their own. They offer a writer working with, often, a fairly […]
Tony Hoagland Graywolf Press ($15) by J. MacNeill Miller Tony Hoagland’s poetry has a tendency to take you by surprise. Somehow, from the unlikely combination of casual, everyday language and subjects that seem downright unpoetic—he has written a poem about visiting the chiropractor and has no qualms waxing sentimental about a young man practicing oral […]
Jerry Griswold Johns Hopkins University Press ($19.95) by Emma Shafer “It is striking,” writes Jerry Griswold in his in-depth inspection of children’s literature, Feeling like a Kid, “how often growing up in children’s literature means looking down and be-littling.” Griswold, then, is child-like at heart, letting none of his years nor any part of his academic nature interfere with his […]