INTERVIEWS
The Quixotic Search for Melancholy: An Interview with Mark Haber
Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Haber discusses his debut novel, Reinhardt's Garden, a unique and playful take of a journey into the heart of darkness as a Croatian attempts a treatise on melancholy.
“How Multiple and How Simultaneous”:
An Interview with Éireann Lorsung
Interviewed by Elizabeth Fontaine, Evelyn May, and Sarah Degner Riveros
Poet Éireann Lorsung discusses her recent work, and how poetry is the synaptic alchemy of all that is happening at any given moment.
A Shaming, Damning, Beautiful Moment:
An Interview with Stephen Markley
Interviewed by Benjamin Davis
Markley discusses his debut novel, Ohio, which combines a murder mystery with large-scale social commentary on the opioid crisis and the Midwest.
Unspeakable:
Conversation Between Michelle Lewis and Jeffrey Morgan
Winners of two Conduit book prizes, Michelle Lewis (for Animul/Flame) and Jeffrey Morgan (for The Last Note Becomes Its Listener), interview each other about the unique experiences that shaped their books and the challenges of translating inexpressible moments into language.
The Spatial Lattice of Consciousness:
An Interview with Neal Stephenson
Interviewed by Allan Vorda
Renowned speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson discusses his newest contribution to his oeuvre with Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, a futuristic take on Paradise Lost.
FEATURES
A Body of Work: The Tour
Essay by Don Cummings
Author Don Cummings describes the trials, the tribulations, and the weight gain during the book tour for his memoir earlier this year.
Two Roads Diverged: Jack Kerouac and Robert Creeley
Essay by Jonah Raskin
Contemporary writers could learn from both Creeley and Kerouac—who came from opposite sides of New England—how difficult it can be to resist the temptations of ego and competition.
FICTION REVIEWS
Night School: A Reader for Grownups
Zsόfia Bán
Hungarian author Zsόfia Bán riffs on subjects far and wide in this assortment of "night school lectures" that mix the historical and meta-historical. Reviewed by John Toren
Save Your Eyes
Vicente Huidobro and Hans Arp
translated by Tom Raworth
Save Your Eyes, a previously ‘lost’ Surrealist manuscript discovered in a cupboard, was published with the blessing of its translator, poet Tom Raworth, shortly before his death. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
Every Mask I Tried On
Alina Stefanescu
In her debut fiction collection, Stefanescu conducts an exploration of the self in order to give shape to the unshapable. Reviewed by Ralph Pennel
Aerialists
Mark Mayer
The short stories in Mark Mayer’s Aerialists are epicenters of rituals and patterns where characters ruggedly assemble themselves, appropriating whatever matter is around to fill themselves out. Reviewed by Nick Hilbourn
Practice Dying
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Two chance encounters instigate the plot of Practice Dying, illustrating the way various forces (religious, political, cultural, economic) bring people into collisions or convergences that shape their lives. Reviewed by Andrew Draper
Time For Bed
Wendy Rawlings
Rawlings' stories in her recent collection offer a rich study in powerful contradictions, employing comic and absurdist modes of writing to produce dissonant effects. Reviewed by Hugh Sheehy
MIXED GENRE REVIEWS
Motion Studies
Jena Osman
Motion Studies is the most recent installment in Jena Osman’s ongoing interrogation of the intersections between human bodies and our technology-obsessed culture. Reviewed by Joseph Houlihan
NONFICTION REVIEWS
The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars
Meghan Daum
In eight chapters, Meghan Daum refreshingly pushes against “the weaponization of ‘social justice culture,’” herd mentalities, and nostalgia, giving readers a look at the state of America and themselves. Reviewed by Erin Lewenauer
Beat: The Latter Days of the Beat Generation: A First-Hand Account
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen’s memoir of his relationships with Beat writers, including lesser known or unknown poets, is notable for its unpretentious working-class perspective. Reviewed by Christopher Luna
The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway and the Left in the Late 1930s
Milton A. Cohen
The Pull of Politics tells the fascinating stories of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway, who all wrote successful novels with leftist politics at the end of the 1930s. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller
Straight Around Allen: On the Business of Being Allen Ginsberg
Bob Rosenthal
Written by Ginsberg’s literary secretary, who ran the home office for two decades while his boss traveled around the world, this memoir offers a new perspective on the poet. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz
POETRY REVIEWS
1919
Eve L. Ewing
Ewing, a poet and sociologist at the University of Chicago, sets out to elucidate the 1919 Chicago race riots through vibrant, poetic voices. Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach
Solar Perplexus
Dean Young
While the hallmarks of Young’s singular style are on display in Solar Perplexus, the tone of these poems is, on the whole, less wry than previous collections, and more candid, both somber and ecstatic. Reviewed by Thomas Moody
At the Last Minute
Estha Weiner
Weiner employs her theatrical background to her poetry, applying nimble precision, careful line breaks, rhythmic mastery, rhyme-sense, Shakespearean allusions, and, above all, simplicity. Reviewed by Walter Holland
Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader
Stephen Jonas
This first major gathering of work by Jonas, a poet of Boston who died in 1970 at the age of 49, reveals a brilliant wordsmith who introduced a gay, gender-bending, street hustling voice into the Modernist tradition. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
Mea Roma: A Meditative Sampling from M. Valerius Martialis
M. Valerius Martialis
In Art Beck’s new Martial translation, Mea Roma, the blending of the aphoristic and the elegiac defines the Roman mastery of the epigram. Reviewed by Paul Vangelisti
Little Glass Planet
Dobby Gibson
In his fourth book, Dobby Gibson stands closer than ever to entropy, to inertia, to the middle-aged feeling that there can truly be nothing better than this life right now. Reviewed by Stephanie Burt
The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus
In The Perseverance, Raymond Antrobus explores marginalized experiences and identity in the not-so-distant past and the post-Brexit world, alarming and unsettling his reader in necessary ways. Reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko