Books
In Conversation
THAD ZIOLKOWSKI with Mindy Cardozo
Wichita, the first novel from Thad Ziolkowski, Director of the Writing Program at Pratt Institute, is a postmodern take on the false binary of the country and the city.
In Conversation
ELLEN PEARLMAN with Jade Sharma
I met with Ellen Pearlman at Yaffa Café in the East Village. She had the salmon. I had an iced mocha. It was a dismal day but we sat outside so I could smoke which, it turned out, I couldn’t. We talked about her book, Nothing and Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant Garde, 1942-1962 which was released by Evolver Editions, an imprint of North Atlantic Books, in April.
In Conversation
TIMOTHY NOAH with Annie Juergens Behr
Timothy Noah admits that he’s rich, at least by the standards he sets out in his new book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (Bloomsbury, 2012).
FICTION
Cave Art
By Aditi Sriram
Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times is meditative, radical, and humorous. This is a compliment to both Chevillard and translator Alyson Waters.
FICTION
Breaking the Frozen Sea of the Soul: Clarice Lispector
By Audrey Schomer
Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920–December 9, 1977) is commonly praised as One of Brazil’s greatest modern writers. When her biographer Benjamin Moser (Why This World, Oxford University Press, 2009) first read one of her earlier Kafkaesque masterpieces, The Passion According to G.H., his obsession could only grow.
FICTION
The Invisible Woman
By Tatiaana L. Laine
Anne-Marie Kinney brings us a first novel that initially seems hollow, another empty tale of office work in America. However, Radio Iris soon shifts into a portrait of a young woman struggling to remain present in a world that seems to disappear before her eyes—family, co-workers, even an elusive office neighbor.
FICTION
A Complete and Lucid Whole
By Andrea Scrima
The renowned Polish writer, translator, and historian Marek Bieńczyk is a subtle thinker who persistently probes the ineffable and revelatory in human perception and experience. Transparency, his second book to be published in English after Tworki (Northwestern University Press, 2008), is a blend of essay, cultural criticism, and metaphysical fiction.
FICTION
Bridge to Brooklyn, and Blues Song
By Stephanie Spiro
In his second novel, an urban noir, Andrew Cotto depicts a rundown Brooklyn neighborhood about to undergo a massive urban gentrification. Cotto’s portrait is beautifully tarnished and transient, stuck in the flux of a renewal that will do more to displace and alienate its inhabitants than to improve their lives.
FICTION
Clean Cole
By Diane T. Masucci
Carter Sickels’s debut novel sweeps you into the doublewide-trailer world of a fictional contemporary Appalachian mountain community whose homes, land, water, and wildlife are shaken daily by the blasting of a corrupt coal mining company who is at work shearing off the community’s Blue Ridge mountaintops—along with their futures.
NONFICTION
Hop Global
By Jesse Tangen-Mills
It used to be hard to find a rap song that didn’t end with international shout-outs. The obvious question was: do they really have fans there? Turns out, they did.
RAPID TRANSIT
Wisdom, Truth, and Beauty—Who Could Ask for More?
By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
An expert on the Objectivist poets, Michael Heller is himself an exemplar of the tradition. Clear, precise, and grounded, his poems display adamantine form and inscrutable technique.
FICTION
Scars to Jar
By Aditi Sriram
In Scars, originally published in 1969 and translated into English last year, Argentine author Juan José Saer entangles four characters in a messy knot of murder and misery.
