René Backmann translated by A. Kaiser Picador ($12) by Spencer Dew Consider the village of Chiyah, where an Israeli-erected barrier “slices in between apartment buildings” and “loops around and through various religious properties (Christian monasteries, pilgrim hostels, churches, schools, and retirement homes),” cutting through “the landscape like a giant chain saw.” Here, as René Backmann […]
Christopher Finch Prestel USA ($23) by Mason Riddle It is hard not to know who Chuck Close is. From his recent appearance on The Colbert Report to the New Yorker ad in which he is clothed in a black leather jacket and the “artist edition” Philip Glass T-shirt he designed for Gap, Close has accrued a media persona that […]
Edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery University of Iowa Press ($39.95) by Patrick James Dunagan Robert Creeley held a privileged and problematic role in American poetry, and his death marks the end of a critical stage in its development. As Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery’s Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work makes […]
Erik Anderson Otis Books/Seismicity Editions ($12.95) by Paula Koneazny In his preface, Erik Anderson describes The Poetics of Trespass as a twofold project of walking and writing: “Over several weeks during February and March of 2007, I walked out the letters of the word ‘pastoral’ across a span of twenty blocks in central Denver, using my apartment […]
Bill Clegg Little, Brown ($23.99) by Scott F. Parker In the urgent, present-tense prose by now standard for addiction memoirs, Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man recounts a prodigious attempt at self-destruction followed by his eventual recovery. It’s a familiar narrative, and one that necessarily undermines any suspense; the fact of the book’s […]
Georges Perec translated by Marc Lowenthal Wakefield Press ($12.95) by Kevin Carollo to see not just the rips, but the fabric (but how to see the fabric if it is only the rips that make it visible: no one ever sees buses pass by unless they’re waiting for one, or unless they’re waiting for someone […]
Tricia Rayburn EgmontUSA ($17.99) by Carrie Mercer Justine Sands is always ready for adventure—fearless, even. It's one of the qualities her sister Vanessa loves about her. Then Justine turns up dead, drowned in a freak weather event, in “currents so strong, Triton himself, the Greek god of the sea that could turn the waves up […]
Josiah McElheny University of Chicago Press ($25) by W. C. Bamberger A German expressionist writer and critic, and a well-known theorist of the use of glass in architecture, Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) authored mostly light-hearted, vaguely astral caprices that were favorites of Walter Benjamin and the Gestalt psychologist and writer Salomo Friedlaender, among others. His short vignette […]
Atiq Rahimi translated by Polly McLean Other Press ($16.95) by Brooke Horvath Afghanistan is the graveyard not only of empires but of countless Afghan war victims, tens of thousands of whom have died in the internecine struggle for power that commenced upon the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. It is in the midst of […]
David Mitchell Random House ($26) by Ed Taylor David Mitchell couldn’t be hotter. He surfs to the literary beach onThe Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet riding a tidal wave of acclaim and attention; at only forty-one, he is routinely compared by critics to giants such as Dickens, Tolstoy, and Pynchon. Mitchell seems a good soul […]