Amitava Kumar Duke University Press ($21.95) by Mukund Belliappa The title of this book is derived from A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, a book of poetry by Edmond Jabes—the prolific Egyptian-Jewish writer who was exiled from Cairo to Paris during the period of tense Arab-nationalism in the 1950s. Some […]
Daniel Tiffany University of Chicago Press ($24) by Michael Snediker We have known for some time that many forms of literary difficulty—Mallarme’s “L'après-midi d'un faune,” Hart Crane’s logic of metaphor, Dickinson’s punctiliously precarious similetic dilations—ask to be inhabited as such. Daniel Tiffany’s new critical book not only returns us to the scene of lyric obscurity, […]
Mark Matthews University of Oklahoma Press ($19.95) by Scott F. Parker Drop City was an artist’s commune outside Trinidad, Colorado, founded by a group of friends from the University of Kansas who lived in domes they built from found, donated, and cheaply purchased car tops and other materials. This much is clear. Also clear is […]
James Baldwin Edited by Randall Kenan Pantheon Books ($26.95) by Spencer Dew Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual James Baldwin focused his career on diagnosing the sickness underlying American racism and advancing a solution rooted in a notion of radical love. For the American republic to survive its “present crisis” of race relations—exemplified in the horror […]
Edited by Cecile Andrews and Wanda Urbanska New Society Publishers ($16.95) by Amy Groshek Given what inequality does to a society, and particularly how it heightens competitive consumption, it looks not only as if the two are complementary, but also that governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also […]
Gary Noesner Random House ($26) by Weston Cutter Given that the word terrorist for most people conjures “middle-easterner,” and the Tea Party movement seems built on ideas remarkably similar to those held by rural militias, Gary Noesner's Stalling for Time is a strangely nostalgic book—one that, for anyone who was alive in the 1990s, will make the last […]
Edited by Diana M. Raab University of South Carolina Press ($24.95) by Brigitte Frase First, a curmudgeonly observation to get out of the way: I do not “journal,” nor am I ever to be found “journaling.” Diana Raab and the essayists she has assembled in Writers and Their Notebooks are fond of these ungainly words. I recognize […]
Patrick Dougherty Princeton Architectural Press ($34.95) by Eliza Murphy Entering one of Patrick Dougherty’s ephemeral twig wonders is to plunge into daydream—a sinuous, lyrical enfolding of pleasurable, vegetable tangles. Looping, swaying, leaning volumes made of saplings woven in seemingly effortless and wild abandon, Dougherty’s sculptures appear to emerge and grow from their surroundings—sometimes as fancy […]
The Knife of Never Letting Go ($9.99) The Ask and the Answer ($9.99) Monsters of Men ($18.99) Patrick Ness Candlewick Press by Kelly Everding The Chaos Walking Trilogy is a breathless ride, a mind-bending cautionary tale that challenges our ideas of power politics between ruler and subjects, men and women, and settlers and indigenous peoples. […]
Pittacus Lore HarperCollins ($12.40) by Shawn Patrick Doyle James Frey knows how to get people talking. In 2005, his memoir A Million Little Pieces was on everyone’s nightstand, including Oprah’s. After revelations that parts of the book had been fictionalized, Oprah had Frey on her show to face her wrath and public condemnation. Frey’s latest venture, the […]