Eric Allen Hall Johns Hopkins University Press ($34.95) by Andrew Cleary Watching politics without understanding the rules of the game is like watching a sporting event without any knowledge of its rules or traditions: it may seem to be a competition of some sort, but there is no way to know who is competing with […]
Caroline Moorehead Harper ($27.99) by Douglas Messerli Although the short foreword to Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France makes it apparent that this work will be covering new material, the narrative itself begins rather slowly. Its first chapter, “Mea culpa,” centers on a few specific French-Jewish families, most of whom […]
Edited by Chet Weise and Ben Swank Third Man Books ($60) by Brian Laidlaw Third Man Records has been at the forefront of a vinyl-record renaissance for over a decade, releasing a string of albums whose physical forms are every bit as beautiful and compelling as the music they contain. With Language Lessons: Volume 1, […]
Interviewed by Simon Wilbanks Trevor D. Richardson is the founder of The Subtopian Magazine and the author of Honeysuckle & Irony (Rainy Day Reads Publishing, $16.95) and American Bastards (Subtopian Press, $14.95). His most recent novel, Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files (Montag Press Collective, $19.95), has been described by Underground Voices Magazine as “a road […]
Interview by Berit Ellingsen Peter Tieryas Liu is the author of the short story collection Watering Heaven and the recent novel Bald New World (Perfect Edge, $16.95). Set in a future where everyone has gone bald and making wigs has become big business, Bald New World is the dystopian tale of two friends, filmmakers Nick […]
Marquard Smith Yale University Press ($40) by Jeremy Biles Half a lifetime ago, just after college, I attempted to become a collector of mannequins. At that time, I had not yet learned of the Surrealists’ fetishistic embrace of mannequins; I had not witnessed Duchamp’s endlessly enigmatic Etant donnés, nor dwelled upon de Chirico’s disquieting muses. […]
Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan translated by Eliza Griswold photographs by Seamus Murphy Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($24) by John Bradley In my dream, I am the president. When I awake, I am the beggar of the world. This is a landay, an oral two-lined folk poem composed and sung by Afghanis. Consisting of twenty-two syllables—nine […]
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet Bull City Press ($14) by J.G. McClure Until reading Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse, winner of the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, I didn’t know what a chapbook could do. I’d read plenty of moving chapbooks, sure. But to create, in only twelve poems, an experience as urgent, as real, and as […]
Paper Lantern: Love Stories Stuart Dybek Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($24) Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Stuart Dybek Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($14) by Robert Martin Let’s get one thing out of the way: Stuart Dybek is a genius and a master of the short story form. His stories are anthologized, taught, scrutinized, and worshipped. […]
Edited by S. T. Joshi Titan Books ($15.95) by Ryder W. Miller If one is interested in the eerie, dark, and cosmological instead of the gory and graphic, one might regularly return to the writings of Howard Philip Lovecraft (1890-1937). Lovecraft’s stories are more profound than scary, but they certainly can be eerie. He had […]