Books
At the End the Baby Disappears
By Laura Jean MooreWith the advent of a new century, it’s heartening to rescue just a few of the many deserving, near-forgotten books that have gone out of print.
The Multifarious Am
By Dean KostosApproximating Diapason is a dialogic manifesto. Not unlike André Breton’s manifestoes, this vortex of language volleys back and forth to create both poetry and a poetics for our current period of literature
Life-Size
By Luis JaramilloBig Books are too often concerned with coming up with systems and rules, the effect of which is to simplify, to comfort the reader with the illusion that things work out in the end. Kimball is not interested in doing this.
Kafka’s Closest Twin Brother
By Andrea ScrimaRobert Walser’s legendary novella Der Spaziergang (The Walk), the first work of his to appear in English and the only one to be translated during his lifetime, is now available in the revised version he published three years after the original edition of 1917.
In Conversation
JOHN SUMMERS and CHRIS LEHMANN with John Cotter
For over 20 years, American culture and politics have been watched over, provoked, and lambasted by the Baffler, a gloriously liberal journal, new issues of which appeared, in their own good time, between 1988 and 2007.
Rapid Transit
By Jeffrey Cyphers WrightIn this shake up call, four devastated communities (termed “sacrifice zones”) are portrayed with tragic clarity. From the riot-burned ruins of Camden, New Jersey, to the bleak farm-worker camps in Florida, the book gives a hard look at very harsh conditions.
In Conversation
THE EDITORS OF ELECTRIC LITERATURE with Aspen Matis and Justin Matis
Electric Literature is an online literary magazine built on the principle that great stories should be available digitally. In 2009, Electric Literature launched a quarterly journal that could be printed on-demand, downloaded onto a Kindle, read on an iPhone, viewed as an e-book, and listened to as audio.
The Art of Nietzsche
By Joseph NechvatalThe Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism is a terribly expensive but mesmerizing book of contemporary interdisciplinary theory that comes across as a chaotic-black velvety luxury item of immense merit.
Tangled Up in Rue
By Jim FeastIn her new novella Watch the Doors As They Close, Karen Lillis employs a technique made famous by Henry James, though in a manner that reverses James’s original intent.
In Conversation
MATTHEW VOLLMER with Weston Cutter
That Matthew Vollmer’d end up chasing stranger forms of prose was not, I don’t think, clear, at least to me when I met him.
In Conversation
MAUREEN McLANE with Adam Fitzgerald
Poetry criticism in our time has suffered a steady marginalization of print attention, to the greater disadvantage of poets, poetry enthusiasts, and the general reader. Even so, the last generation’s kingmakers—Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler—have loosened their grip on reliably championing the newest and most vital contemporary poetry.
