Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col Art by Andy Belanger Idea and Design Works ($19.99) by James R. Fleming An entertaining mix of high-fantasy, Shakespearian pathos, comic book heroics, and postmodern literary tropes, Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare is among the most creative and interesting comic series being produced today. The central idea is built […]

Lauren Redniss It Books ($29.99) by John Bradley Marie Curie would hate this book. Lauren Redniss, author ofCentury Girl, concedes as much in her epigraph to Radioactive: “With apologies to Marie Curie, who said, ‘There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.’” Certainly Curie had a right to her privacy, […]

Think seriously for a moment about how much culture you consume every day. This morning you likely started your day by choosing some clothing to wear, a pair of shoes, maybe some glasses—all of which have been meticulously designed by someone, somewhere. Perhaps as you were getting dressed, you tuned into your favorite music or […]

by James Naiden Leslie Adrienne Miller was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1956, the middle Eisenhower years, and was raised there during the tumultuous aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Her father was a judge, her mother a grade school teacher and active volunteer. Many of the […]

THE POETRY OF SUSAN HOWE: History, Theology, Authority  Will Montgomery Palgrave MacMillan ($80) THE SMALL SPACE OF A PAUSE: Susan Howe's Poetry and the Space Between  Elizabeth W. Joyce Bucknell University Press ($65) THAT THIS Susan Howe New Directions ($15.95) by John Herbert Cunningham Prior to creating the lexicon of Cubism, Picasso and Braque began […]

by Claude Peck Two remarkable artists join hands across time—and across the chasm of some of the most idiosyncratic French ever written—in a new translation by John Ashbery of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (W. W. Norton, $24.95). The project makes so much sense that one wonders why someone didn’t think of it sooner. Ashbery, for one thing, long has […]

by Yuriy Tarnawsky Last year, FC2 published Steve Tomasula’s “new-media novel” TOC, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting that comes on a DVD for “reading” on a computer. A multimedia epic about time—the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through the […]

    by Dylan Hicks With two slim but ambitious books and many short works scattered around literary journals, the poetically named Evan Lavender-Smith has emerged as a writer about whom hype-abused words such asdaring might legitimately apply. Last year’s From Old Notebooks (BlazeVOX, $16) was a hybrid-genre work (a “memiovel” in one of its own proposed classifications) […]