Tag Archives: Fall 2018

University Presses
in a Turbulent World

by Brian Halley Books offer some time away from the din of constant news coverage. There is no news ticker running across the bottom of the page, no big announcement of breaking news. But chosen wisely, these books can inform how we understand that constant news buzz, online or off. Those books published by our […]

Lost Empress

Sergio De La Pava Pantheon ($29.95) by Chris Via Sergio De La Pava’s first book, A Naked Singularity, cast a long shadow that continues to loom over him like Gödel, Escher, Bach over Douglas R. Hofstadter. Even the synopsis on the back cover of Personae, De La Pava’s second novel, is more preoccupied with escaping […]

The House of Nordquist

Book 3 of the Eroica Trilogy Eugene Garber Transformations Press ($9.99) by Martin Nakell In The House of Nordquist, Eugene K. Garber writes not about the war or the truce or the potential for harmony between reason and vision, logos and dream, order and chaos, good and evil, primitive passions and civilized societies—he writes from […]

Pure Hollywood

Christine Schutt Grove Press ($23) by Erin Lewenauer Author of three novels and two short story collections, Christine Schutt, with the exacting grace of a water-skier, takes us prickly places we don’t want to go in her latest story collection. What is this place saying? she asks insistently through numerous characters and their highly individual […]

The New Nudity

Hadara Bar-Nadav Saturnalia Books ($16) by Denise Low Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The New Nudity is a book of riddles, one of the oldest literary forms. The poems examine objects like “Wineglass,” “Spoon,” and “Piano.” Most titles in the book have this one-word, concrete noun format, with only a few variations. The chosen topics may seem, at […]

Electric Snakes

Adrian C. Louis Backwaters Press ($16) by Warren Woessner The title of this poetry collection is an elaboration of its epigraph by D. H. Lawrence: “The world of men is dreaming. / It has gone mad in its sleep, / and a snake is strangling it / but it can’t wake up.” Adrian C. Louis’s […]

Negative Space

Luljeta Lleshanaku Translated by Ani Gjika New Directions ($16.95) by John Bradley “I was a child when my first teacher / mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me / like a needle. / A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly, / my vision cleared— / I saw poetry, / the perfect disguise,” writes […]

The President’s Gardens

Muhsin Al-Ramli Translated by Luke Leafgren MacLehose Press ($26.99) by Mark Gozonsky In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez invented Macondo, a remote Latin American village, where he set the multi-generational saga of the Buendía family, who experience extraordinary events narrated with immensely charismatic composure. Check-check-check on these same elements for Muhsin Al-Ramli’s […]

Witchmark

C. L. Polk Tor Books ($15.99) by Catherine Rockwood In her debut novel, C. L. Polk sets out to show “good people striving to do good things for good reasons” (as she puts it in her Twitter feed). She’s also written one of the most enjoyable romance-plots I’ve read in years, set in a fully […]