Florence Delay, Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Sonja Greenlee, Harry Mathews, Mark Polizzotti, Olivier Rolin Lumen Editions & Alyscamps Press ($12.95) by Kelly Everding With only a few points of plot to go by, seven authors piece together a story that races through the minds of its various narrators--people who know and/or love S., a.k.a. Sue, […]
Busted Scotch W. W. Norton ($23) Seven Stories AK Press Audio ($13.98) by Carolyn Kuebler James Kelman's stories brilliantly render the amorphous, often wordless world of the mind as it putters about, not even thinking so much as just tending to its daily business. On the spoken word CD Seven Stories, he reads: I have […]
Karen Tei Yamashita Coffee House Press ($14.95) by David Kissinger Every night, Rafaela closed tight the doors and windows to the house in Mexico that she was caring for, and every morning she swept crabs from under the bed, though the house was hours from the ocean. Meanwhile, a single orange grew out of season […]
An Interview with Richard Grossman Richard Grossman is a poet masquerading as a novelist. In both his first novel, The Alphabet Man, and his newest effort, The Book of Lazarus, Grossman concocts a dizzying amalgam of genres and voices, typographical daring and visual sophistication. But it is the spirit of poetry that haunts his pages, […]
Edited by Jeffrey Skinner and Sarah Gorham Sarabande Books ($14.95) by Brett Ralph In the introduction to Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, & Deliverance, Jeffrey Skinner recounts the familiar list of writers whose lives were wrecked by alcoholism, earning it that dubious title, "the writer's disease." But alcoholism and addiction, he suggests, are problems […]
(Memory Stand-Ins) Keith Waldrop Avec ($8.95) by David Clippinger Keith Waldrop's The Silhouette of the Bridge is a sustained meditation upon the relationship of knowledge, experience, memory, and spirituality, and especially how that relationship is sometimes reconciled and sometimes troubled by the act of writing. As Waldrop writes, We capture what we can by rendering […]
Jorie Graham Ecco Press ($22) by Eric Lorberer Perhaps a summing up is in order: Jorie Graham's first two books, with their deftly spun yet tightly reined poems, introduced her as a poet of immense lyric capabilities. Her third book, The End of Beauty, exploded the very idea of lyric wide open, scattering it into […]
Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn translated by Tyler Austin and Nicholas Levis Black Rose Books ($19.99) by Charisse Gendron Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger compiles two German-language books on piracy published in the 1990s: Women Pirates, by Ulrike Klausmann and Marion Meinzerin, and Life under the Death's Head, by […]
The Lives and Times of Sun Ra John F. Szwed Pantheon Books ($29.95) by Brad Zellar The list of jazz figures long overdue for decent biographical treatment is a lengthy one, but there is perhaps no one whose life and career seemed a more promising project for biographer and reader alike than the preternaturally singular […]
Edison, Tesla, and the Electric Chair Th. Metzger Autonomedia ($12) by Paul D. Dickinson Blood and Volts is an overpowering tale that illuminates the American fascination with progress, technology, wealth, justice, and death. Metzger shows us, with an easy flowing style, an unflinching view of the development of the electric chair and the absurd scene […]