Books
Matthew's Mark: The Jamestown Epistles
By Anne PelletierMost people born before the 1980s will remember letters. Hand- or typewritten, letters exist in time and in space in a way that text messages, IMs, and emails do not.
Nonfiction: Technocrats of the Mind
By Gordon TapperCharles Bernstein is a merry punster of a very high order, a versatile writer who keeps his audience pleasantly off balance as he serves up an array of readerly pleasures; satires of intellectual complacency, playful appropriations of banal forms of writing, surprising juxtapositions of popular cultures philosophical musings, and penetrating inquiries into the ideological functions of language.
In Conversation
Raw Dog Screaming Press
By Finn HarvorFinn Harvor recently caught up with Jennifer Barnes, an author and the co-founder of Raw Dog Screaming Press. Harvor’s ongoing discussions on the vagaries of publishing can be found at conversationsinthebooktrade.blogspot.com, where an extended interview with Barnes is upcoming.
In Conversation
Sam Sheridan with Rene A. Dreifuss
Following in the footsteps of a long line of writers enamored with the picaresque world of combat, Sam Sheridan abandons the bourgeois security of his Ivy League roots and plunges fists first into the kick-boxing rings of Thailand and later into the caged arenas of the exploding new sport of Mixed Martial Arts, better known among casual enthusiasts as Ultimate Fighting.
Superseriatrical
By Erica WetterIt’s hard to classify Ben Greenman, author of the forthcoming collection of stories A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love. Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker, but it would be unusual for the New Yorker to publish fiction like his.
Three Ways of Looking at It
By Johannah RodgersPerhaps it is inevitable that a book which takes issues of representation as its topic would be both beautiful and terrifying. How could that not be, after all, when sentences grafted one onto the other are not only representing the “real,” but self-consciously creating it.
Poetry: Whistling in the Wind
By Travis NicholsThe era is Korea’s most recent—from the end of the Korean War to the present—and from Ch’oe Sung-ja’s millipede perspective, this anthology of translations reveals the humanity of that age more clearly and movingly than any more authoritative voice ever could.
Who Likes Two?
By Jim FeastBrian Evenson’s The Open Curtain circles around two murky, frightening mysteries: the first contained in the novel proper, which tells the story of a contemporary high-school-age Mormon boy who becomes fascinated with a nineteenth-century murder, the second in the book’s afterword, where the author purports to explain why he wrote the book.
