Tag Archives: Winter 2016

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Patrick Phillips W.W. Norton ($26.95) by Spencer Dew In 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, forced that county’s African American residents into exile. A lynching—three men killed—turned into the threat of pogrom. What Patrick Phillips calls “a racial cleansing” was a simple enough threat: if you stay, you will be killed. This threat […]

The Problem with the Future: An Interview with Alexander Weinstein

Interviewed by Garry Craig Powell Alexander Weinstein is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His stories have received the Lamar York, Gail Crump, and New Millennium Prizes, have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and appear in the anthology New Stories from the Midwest. He is an associate professor of creative writing […]

Multiplicity: An Interview with Ian Hatcher

Interviewed by Steven Wingate Ian Hatcher creates digital and print literature, but resides in the borderlands of each, where computation and language inform and embrace each other. He collaborated on the digital/print hybrid book Abra: A Living Text (Center for Book Arts, 2015) with Amaranth Borsuk and Kate Durbin, and his solo books include The […]

Magpiety: New and Selected Poems

Melissa Green Arrowsmith Press ($20) by M. Lock Swingen When Melissa Green’s debut collection The Squanicook Eclogues was published in 1987, it received awards both from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets. The poems in the collection were something of a shock to the English language, falling into a certain […]

Whiskey, Etc.

Sherrie Flick Queen’s Ferry Press ($16.95) by Erin Lewenauer Author of the 2004 chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume Press) and 2009 novel Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books), Sherrie Flick has been steadily mining her own past and the sometimes buried pasts of others. Her new collection, Whiskey Etc., offers readers only those slices of the […]

Only More So

Millicent Borges Accardi Salmon Poetry by Rachel Slotnick Millicent Borges Accardi’s recent collection of poems, Only More So, navigates a strangely familiar territory through a chorus of forgotten and persistent voices. In this challenging and rewarding book, the poet births grotesque monsters to awaken her audience, and then coaxes them to sleep with remnants of […]

Augustine: Conversions to Confessions

Robin Lane Fox Basic Books ($35) by Douglas Messerli Robin Lane Fox’s Augustine: Conversions to Confessions is an informative, highly scholarly, and, at 657 pages, voluminous study of the great Christian thinker of the third century AD. But it is also a history of Augustine’s times, concentrating almost equally on what Fox describes as a […]

Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook

Clive James Yale University Press ($25) by Mark Dunbar Clive James’s life has been in certain respects a remarkable rags-to-riches story. Raised by his widowed mother (his father died in World War II when his return flight home from Japanese internment crashed in the Philippines’ Manila Bay), James suffered unsuccessfully through his childhood and adolescence […]

SELF INTERVIEW IN THE FORM OF PASSAGES FROM
ISLAND OF THE MAD AND A MONSTER’S NOTES

by Laurie Sheck Why do we assume a mind is just one single mind, the hallucinating woman in my new fiction Island of the Mad says as her symptoms from fatal familial insomnia (a genetic illness) increase. As her hallucinations intensify, she experiences herself at times as Dostoevsky, whose life and work she knows well, […]

100 Chinese Silences

Timothy Yu Les Figues ($17) by John Bradley “If you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning,” claims Tom Wolfe. If Wolfe is right, then Timothy Yu must wake up each morning wearing boxing gloves—at least that’s how the […]