Tag Archives: Fall 2016

Disorder 299.00

Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman Essay Press by Carol Ciavonne On the way to the psych ward      there are elevators that are glass and elevators that are steel      this is clear      most designers and children who do not die in helicopters prefer glass elevators If Disorder 299.00 were not […]

Problems

Jade Sharma Coffee House Press / Emily’s Books ($16.95) by Bradley Babendir Maya, the main character of Jade Sharma’s debut novel Problems, has a lot going wrong in her life. Her marriage isn’t working, she isn’t making much money, she hasn’t made progress on her thesis, and she is addicted to heroin. At different points […]

Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews

Ted Geltner University of Georgia Press ($32.95) by Patrick James Dunagan The life story of novelist Harry Crews is one of triumph and defeat, with defeat usually overwhelming triumph. Not much about Crews is pretty, but it is at times courageous, even if most always raw in accompanying detail. With a lifelong devotion to shocking […]

The Fluidity of the Human Brain: an interview with Frank Bures

by Scott F. Parker Frank Bures writes for many publications, including Harper’s, Runner’s World, The New Republic, Outside, and Poets & Writers. His essays have appeared in Best American Travel Writing and been noted in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Essays. His book The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the […]

Rapture

Sjohnna McCray Graywolf Press ($16) by Renoir Gaither Sjohnna McCray’s debut collection of poems makes obvious the import of Faulkner’s famous aphorism, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Rapture is an absorbing homage to McCray’s growing up as a biracial […]

The Happy Marriage

Tahar Ben Jelloun Translated by André Naffis-Sahely Melville House ($25.95) by Garry Craig Powell The irony of the title of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s new novel, The Happy Marriage, probably goes without saying. The novel is a study in the unravelling of a marriage in the spirit of Ingmar Bergman, whose Scenes from a Marriage is […]

Admit One: An American Scrapbook

Martha Collins University of Pittsburgh Press ($15.95) by Edward A. Dougherty Beginning with the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and proceeding chronologically, Martha Collins’s new book Admit One relentlessly pushes against any sense that we live in a post-racial America. Slowly, inexorably, the supports are removed from any idea that “those kinds of things” […]

The Other One

Hasanthika Sirisena University of Massachusetts Press ($22.95) by Jackie Trytten In this debut collection of short stories, Hasanthika Sirisena presents characters in Sri Lanka and abroad in the aftermath of civil war, which seeps into many of their daily decisions and actions. Some families separate for economic reasons, and others learn it takes as much […]

Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink

Stefan Zweig Pushkin Press ($25) by Jesse Freedman If ever there was an ambassador for Europe, an apostle for its culture and values, that man must have been Stefan Zweig. Born in Vienna in 1881, Zweig emerged during the interwar period as one of the continent’s foremost intellectuals, writing on topics ranging from art and […]