Tag Archives: summer 2007

THE COLORFUL APOCALYPSE: Journeys in Outsider Art

Greg Bottoms University of Chicago Press ($20) by Eliza Murphy Traveling through god-haunted regions with author Greg Bottoms as a guide pitches the reader into unusual physical and psychological territory. No stranger to the Christian-infused South, neither is Virginia-native Bottoms indifferent to the religious preoccupation that sometimes occurs with mental illness. Haunted by the impact […]

THIS YEAR YOU WRITE YOUR NOVEL

Walter Mosley Little, Brown & Company ($19.99) by Kevin Carollo Coming in at around half the length of Chris Baty’s novel-in-a-month plan No Plot? No Problem!, Walter Mosley’s deliberately slim tome on writing a novel over the course of a year is an odd bird. The difference in approach between the two can be glimpsed in […]

THE END OF THE LINE: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat

Charles Clover The New Press ($26.95) by Ryder Miller Charles Clover, an award-winning journalist and an editor for the Daily Telegraph in England, seeks to alert the world about the decline of the world fisheries' stocks in The End of the Line, noting that the concerned consumer has the power to change the dangerous practices contributing to […]

PUSHING ULTIMATES: Fundamentals of Authentic Self-knowledge

Lew Paz Plum Bell Publishing ($21.50) by Jaye Beldo Most people who embark on the path of philosophy quite likely have very little foreknowledge of what they are really getting into: endless, exacting, and unimaginably deep self inquiry; perpetual questioning; continual assessments of one's beliefs; and considered responses to metaphysical and mystical experiences. In our […]

AMERICAN ARTISTS, JEWISH IMAGES

Matthew Baigell Syracuse University Press ($45) by Daniel Morris An emeritus professor of art history at Rutgers, Matthew Baigell has over the last decade become the foremost scholar of 20th century Jewish American art history. Where his previous titles in this area—Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years and Jewish American Artists and the Holocaust—focused on […]

WHITE BICYCLES: Making Music in the 1960s

Joe Boyd Serpent’s Tail ($18) by Mark Terrill At times it seems as though revisionist history is set on reducing the 1960s to a sum lesser than its parts—a sort of bubble of colorful utopian idealism that gently rose on the marketable precepts of flower power, psychedelia, Woodstock, and the hippies; lost altitude with the […]

THE MISLAID MAGICIAN OR TEN YEARS AFTER

Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer Harcourt ($17) by William Alexander An epistolary novel, The Mislaid Magician is written as a series of letters between cousins Kate and Cecy, and between their husbands, Thomas and James. Intriguingly, the authors created the text—their third collaboration—by writing letters to each other in character. All three novels are set in […]

SHARP OBJECTS

Gillian Flynn Three Rivers Press ($14) by Spencer Dew Gillian Flynn has an uncanny command of place, recognizing how the mood of a whole town can be conveyed in watery mashed potatoes dyed red by their proximity, on the plate, to a slab of jello. The gritty particulars of the small southern Missouri town that […]

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

David Marusek Subterranean Press ($40) by Rod Smith David Marusek isn't one to rush a page. The Alaskan science fiction author's first novel—2005's widely praised Counting Heads—evolved over nearly a decade. Thirteen years in the making, Getting to Know You's ten stories and novellas represent all his published short fiction to date. That many ended up feeding […]

POTATO TREE

James Sallis Host Publications ($25) by Morris Collins Collecting stories published over the course of forty years, Potato Tree clearly reflects James Sallis’s distinct, unconventional aesthetic. Inanimate objects come to life, jaguars haunt bedrooms, and orchids compose epic poetry. In the title story, a doctor tells a patient “You just won’t ever know if things are as […]