Nathaniel Dorsky Tuumba Press ($10) by Christopher Luna Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky's Devotional Cinema, which is based on a lecture he delivered to Princeton's March 2001 Conference on Religion and Cinema, is a beautiful celebration of cinema as a form of religion, a "metaphor…for our being." The author persuasively illuminates the formal elements that contribute to […]
Rosamond Purcell The Quantuck Lane Press ($25) by Michelle Mitchell-Foust In Rosamond Purcell's Owls Head, the search for things is the thing. Archivist, collector, artist, and consumer, she searches for eye-catching detritus in the small town of Owls Head, Maine and negotiates the purchase of found objects with local scrapyard proprietor William Buckminster. Purcell then […]
The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight Metta Fuller Victor Duke University Press ($21.95) That Affair Next Door & Lost Man's Lane Anna Katherine Green Duke University Press ($21.95) by Kris Lawson For readers who think that Lifetime movies and the muddled genre books that combine romance and serial killers are a product of our […]
Amanda Stern Soft Skull Press ($12) by Stephanie Anderson In her debut novel, New York writer Amanda Stern depicts the anguish of a doomed and dangerous relationship between a young man and woman—two people who consume each other with the same ferocity with which they consume drugs and alcohol. The book begins with an elegant, […]
Nathalie Sarraute Translated by Maria Jolas Dalkey Archive Press ($12.95) by Stephen Schenkenberg There's probably never been a more serious book about the giggles than Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them?, first published in 1972 and newly re-released in English. The sounds start off lovely enough: "Fresh laughter. Carefree laughter. Silvery laughter. Tiny bells. Tiny […]
Nuruddin Farah Riverhead Books ($24.95) by Scott Esposito Nuruddin Farah's riveting new novel Links begins with its main character, Jeebleh, arriving at the airport in his ancestral Mogadiscio after building a life in America. Soon after he arrives, the question of why he returned arises, and it haunts him throughout the book; it is a […]
Italo Svevo Translated by J. G. Nichols Hesperus Press ($12) by Eric J. Iannelli Italo Svevo began writing A Perfect Hoax, the story of an aging "man of letters" who achieves what he believes to be his long overdue recognition, in 1925—a time when the author himself was receiving belated critical acclaim for his two […]
Alfred Chester Black Sparrow Book ($16.95) by Mark Terrill Originally published by Simon and Schuster in 1967, and reissued by Carroll and Graf in 1986, Alfred Chester's The Exquisite Corpse has twice gone out of print and lapsed into literary limbo, its very unavailability helping elevate it to the cult status by which it is […]
Edited by H. L. Hix Etruscan Press ($22.95) a semi-anonymous symposium, organized by Brian Clements Out of "discontent over the dialogue in our world about poetry," H. L. Hix has attempted to devise a mode of criticism (or perhaps, more accurately, of critique) by "reinventing the conditions of the dialogue." Specifically, Hix is dissatisfied with […]
by Erik La Prade Gerard Malanga has achieved more than his 15 minutes of fame for being "Andy Warhol's most important associate," as the New York Times has rightly called him, and less than his due for his career in poetry, which earned him publication in such venerable magazines as the Partisan Review and the […]