Books
Soft Skull’s New Faces
By Madeleine BaranOn a recent afternoon at 71 Bond Street in downtown Brooklyn, two dozen people crammed together to attend a poetry reading at Shortwave, the new bookstore and headquarters of Soft Skull Press.
In Conversation
JEDEDIAH PURDY with Charles Wilson
Jedediah Purdy's first book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today, argued that America's political and social life had become tainted by ironic detachment.
Notes on Priapism
By K.P. GreenbergThe Immortalists by Richard Cummings
Silky Fetishes
A Spy in Amnesia is a chewy novel—if you can call it a novel.
Geisha, A Life
By Ellen PearlmanSo, what was is the life of a geisha really like? Not the made up fantasy of a Western man’s best seller on the subject, but an authentic geisha, or “artist” in Japanese.
Inspire Me, Baby
By Vanessa MankoThe Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose, HarperCollins (2002)
All Day Permanent Red
By Bradley H. KerrChristopher Logue is a modern rhapsode. Students of Greek antiquity will know that rhapsodes were professional performers of epic poetry. Splendidly attired, they dramatized the deeds of long-dead heroes and immortal gods, as portrayed by Homer and his like, before private audiences and at public festivals.
Regarding the Pain of Others
By John ReedIn a media environment where all images are apportioned to partisan arguments— unreasonable and unthinking—Susan Sontag’s mission to resume a more considered meditation on photography is a noble one.
Under the Shade of a Myrtle Tree with Horace
By Michelle TsaiIn the Divine Comedy, Dante encounters the ancient poets suspended in limbo, the first circle of hell: Homer the supreme poet, Horace the satirist, Ovid, and Lucan. It’s a shame Dante doesn’t describe Horace as a lyric poet, for the four books of the Odes are arguably his most loved and well-known poems.
