Juan José Saer Translated by Hilary Vaughn Dobel Open Letter ($14.95) by Erik Noonan For the most part, contemporary fiction consists of dreams just about to come true, except that now and then a voice interrupts our slumber party, to invoke the tradition of Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes. In this spirit, the anglophone […]
Johnny Damm The Operating System ($26) by John Pistelli In the interview that concludes this hybrid work, poet Johnny Damm confesses, "I'm a cis, white, straight man: I have privilege on top of privilege, and my voice certainly doesn't require amplification." While such a confession, with its histrionic air of noblesse oblige, almost always sounds […]
Mariko Nagai Les Figues Press ($17) by John Bradley "we are still in the before the after : before the before the after," writes Mariko Nagai, reflecting on the nuclear disaster that took place in Fukushima in 2011. The nuclear focus of this book-on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Fukushima-feels quite timely, given our nation's stance […]
Interviewed by Allan Vorda Born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco, Jennifer Egan is known by readers of The New York Times Magazine as a journalist, and to many more readers as one of the pre-eminent fiction writers of our time. Since her first book, a collection of short stories titled Emerald City (1993), […]
Of Mongrelitude Julian Talamantez Brolaski Wave Books ($18) The Absolute Letter Andrew Joron Flood Editions ($14.95) In Memory of an Angel David Shapiro City Lights Publishers ($14.95) by Patrick James Dunagan Every year a number of poetry books are published that seemingly don't receive the attention they deserve. Three such titles published in 2017 are […]
Klaus Kolb Self-published by Jim Kozubek In the spring of 1938, four-year-old Klaus Kolb wakes up to a rhythmic "shrap, shrap, shrap" of Nazi Stormtroopers marching past his house in Goerlitz, the oldest city on the eastern angle of Germany. The black, white, and red flags with cross-like symbols that the soldiers carry became the […]
by Paul E Nelson Based in Walla Walla, Washington for decades, Charles Potts says he has "blazed a clear path thru the wilderness of the times I was fated to live in." An author of numerous volumes of poetry whose work first appeared in Wild Dog magazine in 1963, he's also been a publisher (of […]
Ashley Dawson Verso ($29.95) by Chris Barsanti To an SUV-driving climate change skeptic living in some sidewalk-less exurb, most solutions proffered by environmentalists for saving the planet must seem like a kick in the teeth. Those plans' underlying assumptions are usually that energy-guzzling cars and big suburban houses are selfish and wasteful. They also assume […]
Pierre Voélin Translated by John Taylor Bitter Oleander Press ($25) by Greg Bem Nothing more born on your lips neither words nor the tress of screams no breath save the astonished shadows the unstitched thread of the violets ("In a Hay Meadow" Words and Famine, 1995) This first major collection of English translations of Pierre […]
by Garry Craig Powell Roz Morris is a novelist, book doctor, and writing teacher, and has sold 4 million books as a ghost-writer. In her first collection of essays, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction (Spark Furnace), travel writing intersects with memoir. Morris visits off-the-beaten-track spots, mostly dwellings in rural England such […]