Edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright Coffee House Press ($15.95) by Peter Conners “The poet archivist represents a community of memory that predates church and state and, if we play it right, will outlive them. The Tewa Indian anthropologist Alfonso Oritz said that rather than seeing the tribe as a step in the evolution […]
by Kevin Smokler The work of Anne Fadiman is one of the best rebukes in contemporary letters to the moldy myth that a subject’s size is the best measure of its importance. She first rose to prominence as a journalist via her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the story of an […]
R. Sikoryak Drawn and Quarterly ($19.95) by John Pistelli If you go to a used bookstore on the lookout for cheap literary classics, you will inevitably run into 1950s and '60s mass-market paperback editions of such great books as Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights, and Macbeth—pocket-sized, priced for the masses, and often with beautiful covers by […]
Illustrated by R. Crumb W. W. Norton & Company ($24.95) by Britt Aamodt As books sold to and packaged for the consumer market, Bibles have been around for centuries, but there’s never been a version like this. The iconoclastic cartooning genius R. Crumb's latest endeavor is a graphic adaptation of the first book of the […]
Nikos Engonopoulos edited and translated by Martin McKinsey Green Integer ($13.95) by George Kalamaras “He was a born orthodox, as charged by Surrealism as an electrical pole is by electricity. No one could touch him without agreeing to suffer a powerful discharge.” —Odysseus Elytis, on Nikos Egonopoulos Surrealism moved through Greece like a wildfire in […]
Paul Pines Marsh Hawk Press ($15) by Jon Curley “The future is only the past turned around to look at itself,” instructs Fanny Howe in her recent memoir The Winter Sun. Paul Pines’s poetry invokes this elegant truth with forceful, sometimes feverish pitch. His new volume, Last Call at the Tin Palace, projects and introspects, cultivating a […]
Cathy Park Hong W. W. Norton & Company ($14.95) by Dale Terasaki When one thinks of the thematic territories explored by Asian American poets, it is reasonable to conjure up images of the common immigrant experience, unique family dynamics, or self-discovery amidst conflicting cultural pressures. Yet Cathy Park Hong proves that ethnic background is not […]
Christopher McDougall Knopf ($24.95) by Scott F. Parker The spur that starts Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run in motion is a pain that appears in his foot when he runs. McDougall’s search for a remedy leads him to the Tarahumara Indians of the Copper Canyon in Mexico, a legendary tribe whose members, even its elderly members, participate […]
Tracy Daugherty St. Martin’s Press ($35) by Jacob M. Appel When hiring short-story author Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) for the managing editorship of Location magazine in 1962, art critic Thomas Hess advised his new employee, “The only adequate criticism of a work of art is another work of art”—wisdom that became Barthelme’s own literary battle cry. So Barthelme […]
bell hooks Routledge ($24.95) by Jay Besemer Prominent African American feminist educator and cultural critic bell hooks continues her important "teaching trilogy" with Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. This engaging and thought-provoking volume differs slightly from the previous two books in the series in that it consists of thirty-two mini-essays written from her rich dialogue with […]