Aleister Crowley Wordsworth Editions ($7.99) by Spencer Dew In this posthumous collection of stories by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), we see evidence of the Great Beast’s comparative religious and occult knowledge, though too often this is hauled into service for the churning out of tepid pulp pieces. Dust off some Vedanta, plug in the cult of […]
Wendy S. Walters Futurepoem Books ($16) by Ashleigh Lambert How does racism make a space? In Troy, Michigan, Wendy S. Walters turns sonnets into maps that document the terrain of oppression. If a collection of sonnets seems like an archaic approach to confronting the structures that enable racism, consider: sonnets and suburbs both concern themselves […]
interviewed by Sarah Suzor E.B. White once wrote, “It is not often someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” The line is about his immortal character Charlotte, but it could easily apply to Jessica Piazza and Jill Alexander Essbaum; their story of writerly friendship supersedes the possible ego of competition, […]
Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26) by Calista McRae The Sellout opens in the hallways of the Supreme Court, where the narrator—the defendant in an impending trial, and the sellout of the book’s title—is fortifying himself with an especially potent joint. His explanation of his crimes forms the core of this bristling, exhausting, constantly […]
Sven Birkerts Graywolf Press ($16) by Scott F. Parker If you wanted to reduce Sven Birkerts’s Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age to a nice, digestible nugget of information, the subtitle gets you pretty much there. You can assume, rightly, that the book argues for art in the face of the […]
Adrian Tomine Drawn & Quarterly ($22.95) by Steve Matuszak Killing and Dying could almost be the title of a long-lost noir featuring Richard Widmark as a streetwise tough struggling to survive in a chiaroscuro urban landscape of moral ambiguity, all while torn between his love for a woman and his .45. With his penetrating new […]
Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic Translated by Kirsten Lodge Artwork by Sascha Schneider Twisted Spoon Press ($21.50) by Jeff Alford First published in 1900 and hailed as a fundamental work of Czech Decadence, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s A Gothic Soul is an essential volume of anxiety-riddled philosophy—one to shelve prominently alongside comparable masterworks like Dostoevsky’s Notes […]
Collected Poems Rainer Brambach Translated by Esther Kinsky Seagull Books ($21) Seasonal Time Change Michael Kruger Translated by Joseph Given Seagull Books ($21) by Peter McDonald Founded in 1982 in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, Seagull Books publishes work in English by authors from around the world, specializing in African, French, German, Swiss, and Italian writers in […]
Meagan Brothers Three Rooms Press ($15.95) by Jay Besemer What makes us love who and what we love? What makes us who we are? Do our loves make us who we are? In Weird Girl and What’s His Name, Meagan Brothers’s crisp, compassionate novel for young adults, all of these questions are explored from various […]
Fabiano Alborghetti Translated by Marco Sonzogni Guernica Editions ($20) by Graziano Krätli Current events and crime news keep feeding fiction and creative nonfiction alike, but remain difficult to digest in poetry. This is not because of any real or presumed affinities between “news style” and other forms of “ordinary writing,” but simply because some “currencies” […]