Bob Rosenthal Beatdom Books ($28) by Richard Kostelanetz Though many books have been written about Allen Ginsberg since I profiled him for the New York Times Magazine in 1965, this one told me much that I’d not known before. Uniquely, it is written from the perspective of Ginsberg’s literary secretary, who ran the home office […]

Interviewed by Allan Vorda Born in Maryland, Neal Stephenson is the son of a professor of electrical engineering and the grandson of a physics professor. The family moved to Illinois and later to Ames, Iowa, where Neal graduated from high school. He received a B.A. in 1981 from Boston University with a major in geography […]

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 […]

Raymond Antrobus Penned in the Margins ($14) by Margaryta Golovchenko What language would we speak without ears? —“Echo” 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. The poems not only call out famous figures like Alexander Graham […]

Dobby Gibson Graywolf Press ($16) by Stephanie Burt If Dobby Gibson can be said to have a single subject, it’s one that makes his collections (four so far) consistent and wondrous, but also makes them hard to praise in brief: he writes about what Sigmund Freud named “ordinary unhappiness,” the discontent and persistent pain that […]