Tag Archives: summer 2007

THE GOLEM: And the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague

Yudl Rosenberg Edited and translated by Curt Leviant Yale University Press ($25) by Jessica Bennett Much of Jewish history in the Christian era has been marked by systematic discrimination and punctuated by periodically brutal persecution. In recent history, the Holocaust, or Shoah, has been the most pronounced example, but it is hardly the only instance of […]

LIVES OF MAPMAKERS

Alicia Conroy Carnegie Mellon University Press ($16.95) by Katie Harger Alicia Conroy’s collection Lives of Mapmakers uses a beautifully written ensemble of narrative identities to reach the book’s underlying themes of temporality, uncertainty, and loss. Though the voice Conroy uses is rarely her own, her message is consistent: nothing will last forever. Her characters come to this […]

ADAM HABERBERG

Yasmina Reza Translated by Geoffrey Strachan Alfred A. Knopf ($19.95) by Ryan Rase McCray Nearly all of Yasmina Reza’s creative output examines a short list of pet themes: the nature of art (in her breakthrough play—appropriately titled Art—three friends squabble over a white painting); the division between the internal self and the social self (nearly 80 […]

BED | EEEEE EEE EEEE

Tao Lin Melville House ($14.95 each) by Spencer Dew “Where were you when the towers happened?” someone is asked in Tao Lin’s debut story collection, Bed. The trick there, of the verb, is precisely what Lin is after—a way to capture the larger cultural moment of post-9/11, a moment defined less by planes, fire, and death as […]

THE PESTHOUSE

Jim Crace Nan A. Talese ($24.95) by Kelly Everding Of all the possible futures for America, there are few more chilling than the ruined and devolved country imagined by Jim Crace, one in which Manifest Destiny has reversed eastward in a sad retreat to the mother country. One might think this story a sort of […]

THE GLORIES OF ECCENTRICITY: A CONVERSATION WITH MARY ANN CAWS

Mary Ann Caws titled her latest book Glorious Eccentrics (Palgrave, $35), in honor of the seven women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries she profiles within its pages. Caws maintains that for her the term eccentric is “an approbation rather than a criticism” and “the very opposite of pejorative.” Eccentricity is a key to survival for […]

A Walk with Stephen Vincent

Interview by Francis Raven An influential presence in the poetry scene of San Francisco, Stephen Vincent has been publishing his poetry since the 1960s and is the former editor and publisher of Momo's Press. His essay, "Reading Poetry: San Francisco Bay Area, 1958-1980," in The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Performance (edited by Vincent […]

The “C” word: Chef? AN INTERVIEW WITH IRVINE WELSH

Anyone familiar with Irvine Welsh’s gritty, landmark debut, Trainspotting, can’t help but be burdened by some pretty ghoulish assumptions upon meeting the Scottish writer. So in some ways it seems fitting that what you get instead is a comfortable, easygoing man firmly in control of his career. As all successful writers must, Welsh has become adept […]

AN EGO STRONG ENOUGH TO LIVE: TRANSLATING CÉSAR VALLEJO

Editor's Note: In January 2007, César Vallejo's The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, was released by University of California Press (reviewed in our Spring 2007 Print Issue). In the following talk, originally given at Michael Heim’s translation seminar at UCLA in February 2007, he discusses the psychic struggle and lasting impact […]