Jim Jarmusch, John Yau, and Harold Schechter Heck Editions ($29.95) by Brian Evenson With forty-three color plates, numerous black and white images, and essays by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, art critic John Yau, and cultural critic Harold Schechter, Original Sin is a strong introduction to Joe Coleman's painting. In work that owes something to altar pieces, […]

Prose Pieces Maurice Kenny White Pine ($14) by Mark Anthony Rolo For most of his life, Maurice Kenny has been a "Mohawk poet on the road." Leaving his homeland, the foothills of northern New York state, the young mixed-blood Kenny grew up traversing the country—city to city, writing and teaching. Now, he wants to go […]

Rosamond Purcell Chronicle Books ($24.95) by Rikki Ducornet The monstrous is unsettling because it appears to belong nowhere but its own boundless category. Like a lobster at a kosher meal, it always exemplifies chaos. Reduced to curiosities, the bearded lady, the piebald child, and the dwarf are thrust into an impossible genus: extraordinem—containing everything from […]

Hal Bennett Turtle Point Press ($14.95) by Daniel Garrett Hal Bennett's Lord of Dark Places, originally published by W. W. Norton in 1970 and recently restored to print, is many things: a twentieth century novel; a biography of a young sex god; a family drama involving self-sacrifice, betrayal, and incest; a document of black American […]