BOok Review Alphabetical Index

Cleaver reviewers present the most exciting literary work from around the globe. We specialize in American independent press releases but also vital work in translation that’s all too often overlooked by American readers.

Cleaver’s full alphabetical (by title) index of reviews of books by small and independent presses:
Looking for reviews by genre? Try: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young adult, or graphic narrative. Looking for our latest reviews? Try here.
Are you a publisher or author looking for information on how to submit a book for review? Email the book review editors.

10:04 by Ben Lerner Faber and Faber, 245 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz "Museum Quality Framing" He calls her a “chthonic deity,” but despite the devilish pleasure she takes in smashing the Koons balloons in the middle of Ben Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, Alina, the narrator’s close friend, turns out to be a remarkably Christic figure. After she successfully urges this doubting skeptic to touch—really, it’s all right to touch—the famous and costly works of art that her start-up, the delightfully named “Institute for Totaled Art,” has been loaned by repossessing insurance agencies, Alina restores something ineffable and lovely to the world shared by Lerner and his readers. He leaves her loft. The rainclouds have passed and the air smells sweet. It’s not the evening yet, but it feels, still, like the “magic hour, when light appears immanent to the lit.” 10:04 is Lerner’s impressive follow-up to 2011’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It aspires to make more meaningful connections between art and life; philosophy and experience. Atocha sets a high bar. That novel’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, wandered through Madrid in 2004, lonely as an El Greco cloud, thinking about Lukacs while staring at Bosch; in the meantime, cultivating a ...
33 DAYS by Léon Werth, with an introduction by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [translated by Austin Denis Johnston] Melville House Publishing, 116 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin There are occasions when a phrase or a paragraph or a book hits the main line and after the dose everything is different. 33 Days arrived in the mail ten days ago, on a Friday. Guests were coming for the weekend. Already, the city was filling with people. The weather was warm, finally; pink and purple and white flowers garlanded the city. Fragrance smothered street corners. Whole neighborhoods were ripe for seduction. The book, slender and impeccably designed, put itself in my hands. I gazed at it quickly then put it down on the cushion in the old grocery store window where in winter we take turns stretching toward the sun. I picked it back up. I hadn’t heard of Léon Werth. But Saint-Exupéry—we forget Saint-Exupéry at our peril. Still, with masses of people sweeping by the window just as the leaves do in autumn, I skipped the introduction, which Saint-Exupéry wrote in late 1940 to accompany both French and English versions of 33 Days. I went straight for the narrative ...
33 REVOLUTIONS by Canek Sánchez Guevara, translated by Howard Curtis Europa Editions, 94 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Canek Sánchez Guevara’s 33 Revolutions is a prayer of a novel with a single liturgical refrain and a retort (of a kind) to the giddiness emitting from the American-Cuban travelsphere. Not since Reinaldo Arenas has a Cuban literary voice arrived on American shores with such beaten madness, and sense of personal desperation. Sánchez Guevara, who died last year at age 40, was the eldest grandson of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His mother, Hilda Guevara Gaesa, was Che’s oldest child; Hilda’s mother (also Hilda) introduced Che to the Castro brothers in the mid-1950s. (It’s worth remembering that the American literary public became enamored of Arenas after his death, too.) The unnamed protagonist of 33 Revolutions is a twenty-something employee of some Cuban government bureau or the other, a Winston Smith who has begun to break. The translator Howard Curtis amply translates the protagonist’s inner-voice and darkening setting from Spanish to English. “Water seeps in through the windows,” the protagonist notices, “soaks the walls, forms pools on the floor. Mud. Grime and more grime. A grimy scratched record.” Sánchez Guevara was raised in Havana ...
99 NAMES OF EXILE by Kaveh Bassiri Newfound, 40 Pages reviewed by Claire Oleson In his poem “Memorial Day” Kaveh Bassiri tells us: My absence is momentous. When I left Tehran, a revolution ......swelled in my place. When I left Berlin, the wall came ......down. And when I leave tomorrow, the airports will close. It is inside this momentous absence that Kaveh Bassiri’s prize-winning chapbook 99 Names of Exile traces its focus⁠— a conscientious unravelling of what it might mean to be gone from a place and have it be (at least partially) gone from you. The specific absence Bassiri focuses on is accompanied by a sense of irrevocable inaccessibility; it comes after forced immigration and it leaves behind it a different Tehran, a different Berlin. This exile is complex and shifting, it is not the product of a static or singular expulsion, but perhaps more accurately, it’s an imposed exercise that takes continual effort survive. Later in “Memorial Day” the speaker notes “Each morning, in order not to sink, I have to bail the news out/ of me.” Staying aloft is not a default in Bassiri’s poetics of absence, it too requires a constant expulsion of words as news ...
A 52-HERTZ WHALE by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman Carolrhoda Lab, 197 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson When a humpback whale becomes separated from its pod, it emits a unique song in an effort to find its way back to its loved ones. When certain people experience feelings of isolation, they seek companionship through indirect social interaction. Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman's A 52-Hertz Whale explores the nature of loneliness through a series of email correspondences, all between people with little else in common other than the desire for understanding. From the conversations of these starkly different people springs a series of beautiful, if uncanny, friendships. A 52 Hertz-Whale reveals that some of the most meaningful relationships can be forged even when the only thing we have in common is the fear of being alone. Fourteen-year-old James Turner ("[email protected]") sends his first email after discovering that his adopted humpback whale, Salt, was separated from its migratory pod. Recent film graduate Darren Olmstead ("[email protected]") receives the long email detailing James' efforts to uncover the lost whale’s whereabouts, and a plea for Darren's assistance. What a kid from a middle school social skills class wants with the guy who ...
A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck Ecco Press, 128 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.” Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community. Finck foregrounds this theme early ...
A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE by Beth Vrabel Sky Pony Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 288 pages reviewed by Mandy King A Blind Guide to Stinkville is a story told through the fuzzy vision of 11-year-old Alice, whose albinism and near blindness give her the perspective to uncover hidden stories of the people in her new town. The genius of Vrabel’s approach is that the reader meets the other characters through nuances of feelings and impressions rather than stark physical descriptions. The book is not a page-turner plot-wise and there are no major catastrophes; instead the novel peers beneath the superficial to reveal important lessons about what it means to be a member of small town community. Despite the fact that Alice has to use a magnifying glass to read a book a few inches from her face, she is the only person in the story who truly sees what is going on around her. Initially, Alice thinks her new hometown of Sinkville, aka “Stinkville,” is a horrible place dominated by the terrible smell emanating from the local paper-mill. It’s nothing like where she grew up in Seattle. However, as Alice reveals the stories of the townspeople, ...
A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS by Alyssa Sheinmel Sourcebooks Inc, 338 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Hannah Gold was supposed to be enjoying everything California had to offer; getting ahead on her studies at a collegiate summer program; hiking through the mountains and sunbathing on the beach; enjoying her summer with her roommate and new best friend, Agnes. That is, until Agnes falls and lapses into a coma, and Hannah finds herself institutionalized in a seven-foot by eight-foot room, where she doesn't feel she's supposed to be at all. Alyssa Sheinmel's engrossing novel A Danger to Herself and Others, is an intriguing page-turner set almost entirely within the walls of a mental institution. It delves deep into Hannah's mind as she wrestles, not only with what happened the night of Agnes’ fall, but with her own mental state. Reminiscent of Ken Kesey's classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hannah is this story’s R.P. McMurphy – the intelligent, conniving, and self-proclaimed “sane” protagonist of her own narrative. She goes about her first days studying her surroundings, taking note of certain privileges that will get her ever closer to freedom (group showers, cafeteria access, and ...
A FAIRLY GOOD TIME by Mavis Gallant NYRB, 273 pages reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner A Canadian in Paris who must always remind her French friends that she is not American. A young widow who remarries a Frenchman, whom she later divorces. A twenty-seven-year-old who is “about like [she] always [was], to tell . . . the truth. Reading instead of listening.” This is Shirley Perrigny, formerly Higgins (nee Norrington), and the protagonist of Mavis Gallant’s 1970 novel A Fairly Good Time. Gallant, just like Shirley, was a Canadian who made Paris her home. Perhaps known best for her acclaimed short stories, Gallant wrote two novels, A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky. These two novels were re-published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, just two years since Gallant’s death at age 91. Set in Paris in the 1960s, A Fairly Good Time is Shirley’s story, but Gallant does such a remarkable job capturing the confusion and chaos of life that it could be anyone’s. Shirley, who struggles to recognize the reality around her, is very easy to relate to, at least for this reader. Shirley, indeed, loves to read. She tries to handle ...
A FIERCE AND SUBTLE POISON by Samantha Mabry Algonquin Young Readers, 278 pages reviewed by Allison Renner Everywhere we go we are surrounded by stories. Stories about people and places, stories that are told and retold until they are so shrouded in mystery, no one remembers the origin, and no one is brave enough to discover the truth. Like Samantha Mabry’s legend of the poisonous girl. Lucas Knight and his father come to Puerto Rico every summer from Houston, Texas. Lucas’s father transforms abandoned, historical buildings into extravagant resorts, while Lucas is content to find trouble with his friends—at least until he’s old enough to take over his father’s business. The island is populated with legends of curses and witches, which Lucas believes despite his father telling him not to. Lucas’s mother was Puerto Rican and told him her fair share of myths before she disappeared. He and his friends build on the myths they hear, spinning their own versions until they don’t remember what’s supposedly true. This much is common knowledge: there is a house where a scientist lives. A white man. He was married to a Puerto Rican woman, but traveled often for work, leaving his wife alone ...
A GHOST IN THE THROAT by Doireann Ní Ghríofa Biblioasis [North American edition forthcoming in June] reviewed by Beth Kephart “This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion. A female text because Ní Ghríofa suffuses her days with the domestic arts of hoovering, dusting, folding, mothering, and bends her prose toward those ticking rhythms when she carves out a moment and writes. A female text because Ní Ghríofa carries the lament of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman of the late eighteenth century, in her bones as she works—a poem called Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem of howling grief erupted from the murder of the poet’s husband. A female text because the words have risen up in Ní Ghríofa and stayed: This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours. Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography ...
A GIRL ON THE SHORE by Inio Asano Vertical Comics, 406 pages reviewed by Helen Chazan In a 2013 interview, Inio Asano cites learning the phrase “chunibyo” as an inspiration for A Girl on the Shore. A Japanese meme, “chunibyo” translates roughly to “Eighth Grader Syndrome,” and describes an early adolescent’s tendency to aspire to and imitate the adult behaviors that she is too young to understand. The comic, a direct and emotionally intense story about two early adolescents who enter a sexual relationship, functions as a parable of “chunibyo,” exploring this youthful desire to seem more mature as well as its consequences. In contrast to this motif, A Girl on the Shore is a deceptively mature accomplishment, employing the techniques of commercial manga to the greatest level of sophistication to convey the searing anxieties of adolescence. This is a graphic novel about two teenagers, Koume and Keisuke, who decide to start having sex when they are very young. Both are haunted by recent trauma: Koume by her rape at the hands of a popular kid named Misaki, and Keisuke by the death of his older brother. They enter the relationship believing it will be strictly sexual, an escape from normal life ...
A GREATER MUSIC by Bae Suah translated by Deborah Smith Open Letter Press, 128 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman Bae Suah’s newest English-translated work, A Greater Music, describes the Austrian composer Franz Schubert as “a short, fat, shy myopic.” As brutal as this description is of a man who unhappily died before his 32nd year, it seems altogether different in tone when used to describe Bae’s novel itself. Filled with observatory indifference and an almost disembodied airiness, the novel comes across particularly as commentary, and as particularly rebellious. But what’s striking about A Greater Music is that it treats the work of Schubert above the man, treats the novel above the social, giving grandeur to otherwise short, fat, shy myopics. They are breathing things that were trapped in frames ill-suited for their sublimity—short in length, fat with substance, shy about their revelations, and myopic in their attentions, they are beings greater than their comportment can present. Something so heavy has rarely looked so light. Superficially, A Greater Music comes across like a South Korean variation on Bret Easton Ellis. The story of a bored, well-to-do individual striving to communicate in a world foreign to her—in A Greater Music, the world ...
A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME by David Gates Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages reviewed by Jeanne Bonner It’s December and you may be looking for a holiday read (with a bang). A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a short story collection that offers a rare pleasure: the possibility of reading it cover to cover, leaping from one story to the next. Some readers, including this one, may want to protest the gallery of rogue characters David Gates presents in this new collection perhaps enough to wonder who Gates hangs out with. I’m reminded of the scene from the film Ocean’s 11 when Julia Roberts’ character says to George Clooney, who plays Danny Ocean, “Your problem is you’ve met too many people like you.” Some of these characters’ habits and inclinations, reflections and bitter asides, are just this side of depraved (or perhaps for some people, the other side of depraved). Indeed, the people in Gates’ stories can wear a bit, with their biting sarcasm and world-weariness. Yet there is no denying the sure hand behind these stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Gates knows his characters so well that the descriptions and ...
A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls translated by Ellie Robins Melville House, 197 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn't fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it's central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker's guitar case, it's difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls is an Argentinian novelist, essayist, and critic who has been writing fiction for years while holding various academic and editorial posts in Argentina and the United States. Indeed, he seems to be so active and prolific in his various roles that it's perhaps surprising that Pauls' 2007 novel, The Past, has, until now, been his only work to have received an English language translation. With A History of Money, he should have assured that such negligence comes to an end. This is a skillfully realized work, as accomplished in its execution as it is acute in its criticism. The novel ...
A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene Burlesque Press, 189 pages, 2015. reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa In the very first scene of A House Made of Stars, Tawnysha Greene’s debut novel, the ten-year-old narrator and her sister are awakened by their mother, who spirits them to a darkened bathroom where all three sit in the bathtub, towels piled over them, while the house shakes with thuds so loud even the narrator’s deaf sister can feel their vibrations. Their mother tells them it’s a game. She tells them they’re practicing for earthquakes. But even at ten, the narrator knows it’s not nature’s rage they need to fear. It’s their father’s. Greene’s voice in this novel is pitch perfect, an eerie and convincing combination of innocence and prescience. The hard-of-hearing narrator is homeschooled and isolated; her mother believes public schools will not teach “Godly things.” Yet her understanding of their family dynamic and her father’s mental illness are intuitive and profound. Without adult labels or filters, we see his depression, his paranoia, his moments of happy, expansive mania that can change in an instant to brutal  outbursts, and the scars he carries from his own violent childhood. We see her mother’s ...
A MAN LIES DREAMING by Lavie Tidhar Melville House, 294 pages reviewed by Kylie Lee Baker When a novel opens the gates of Auschwitz, we expect to be moved by a tale most of us are familiar with. We expect to see Elie Wiesel searching for his father’s emaciated body in the snow. We wait for Oskar Schindler to brush snow from his car and then realize that it is not snow but the ashes of burned bodies. Above all, we anticipate a tale that unites us in our hatred of Nazi Germany and makes us weep for the injustices inflicted on Jewish people. A Man Lies Dreaming is none of these things, and never brings us down the path we expect. This is Lavie Tidhar’s third novel, published in Europe in 2014 and now released in America, winner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, A Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of the Year, a Scotland Herald Best Crime Novel of the Year and a British Fantasy Award nominee. A Man Lies Dreaming follows Wolf, a private detective who flees from a concentration camp in Germany and works in 1930s London among Nazis and fascists. He is hired to find a wealthy Jewish woman’s missing sister and investigate ...
A MEAL IN WINTER by Hubert Mingarelli translated by Sam Taylor The New Press, 138 pages reviewed by Jeanne Bonner A Meal in Winter by French author Hubert Mingarelli is a subtle book that quietly but methodically stalks the reader’s sympathies. It does so through a beautiful, spare prose style that begins with the first line: “They had rung the iron gong outside, and it was still echoing, at first for real in the courtyard, and then, for a longer time, inside our heads.” This is lovely writing (deftly rendered from the French by translator Sam Taylor, himself a novelist)—yet a bit ominous, like something that can’t be escaped. Later, setting the scene for the winter’s walk that takes up much of the first part of the narrative, he writes: “A pale sun hung in the sky, as distant and useless, it seemed to us, as a coin trapped under thick ice.” Trapped. What is trapped? Or who? But in this review, there’s no point in being subtle about the book’s plot: it’s about three rank-and-file German soldiers who go out into the woods one cold, snowy winter day during World War II for one purpose and one purpose only. And that’s to hunt for Jews who ...
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST by László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A Mountain to the North, but even that feels generous. The grandson of Prince Genji, as he’s referred to throughout the novella, isn’t substantial enough to have his own name. He wears a kimono and geta, he gets motion sickness, and he loves gardens. He isn’t very notable, but he isn’t lacking either. He may be the only person, but he’s a supporting player, and as such his costars of trees, rocks, water, and wind often outshine him. The grandson of Prince Genji is our tour guide, a human figure we can hang our hats on as László Krasznahorkai chips away at the real story: the relentless, unending march of time over millions and billions of years. Geologic time may seem like a comically large topic for a novella, but it’s in good hands. Across his career, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has proven that he’s more than capable of tackling ...
A MYRIAD OF ROADS THAT LEAD TO HERE by Nathan Elias Scarlet Leaf, 72 pages reviewed by Kelly Doyle  Nathan Elias’ first novella, A Myriad of Roads that Lead to Here, tells a story that is simultaneously frustrating and accessible. This bildungsroman provides a snapshot into the emotional journey of a naive and sometimes selfish narrator, Weston, as he grapples with the untimely death of his mother, which had occurred a few months before. Home from college for the summer, Weston decides to walk to the ocean. He hopes that this trip, modeled after stories he has read, will cure him of his pain. Unfortunately, the reader quickly realizes that this journey is not only fruitless, but may have the reverse effect than was intended. Brief moments of human connection, as fleeting as smoking a cigarette and seeing another person doing the same or giving a child a quarter to buy a candy, are all that give Weston any relief on his walk. During these moments, when Weston reaches out to another human being, the reader can feel the void in his heart. That void only grows as he moves on, determined to finish his painful quest and all ...
A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH, 1586-1987 by Kathryn Hellerstein Stanford University Press, 496 pages reviewed by Alyssa Quint Poetry by female Yiddish writers has become the tree that falls in the empty forest of Jewish literature. As a discrete body of work it resonated only faintly with the same Yiddish critics and scholars who gushed over male Yiddish authors. English translations have become an important repository of the dying vernacular of East European Jews but, again, not so much for its female poets. Women's Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987. Hellerstein organizes her book around the concept of a literary tradition as invoked by the likes of T.S. Eliot in his monumental essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." To Eliot's eloquent if male-dominated and Eurocentic discussion of what "compels a man to write," (my italics), Hellerstein counters with a chain of women who work off the energy of the East European Jewish female experience with its idiosyncrasies of language, religion, gender, and culture. The Yiddish poetry of the sixteenth to ...
A ROOM AWAY FROM THE WOLVES by Nova Ren Suma Algonquin Young Readers, 304 pages reviewed by Rachel Hertzberg  Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver The title of Nova Ren Suma’s gripping new book, A Room Away from the Wolves, refers to its central location, but also to an unobtainable promise: a place where a girl can go to be truly safe. This novel resists easy categorizations. Not just a ghost story, not just a coming-of-age story, A Room Away from the Wolves will leave readers questioning the notion of safety in a world where the most dangerous enemy is one’s own past—and double-checking dark corners of the bedroom before going to sleep. Eighteen-year-old Sabina “Bina” Tremper has grown up hearing her mother’s stories of Catherine House, a boarding house in New York City where she lived for one glorious summer. Bina believes that Catherine House is a refuge—a room away from the wolves. In her mother’s stories, girls at Catherine House shun the outside world in favor of a private, all-female society. It sounds like a fairy tale: “It was red-bricked and eyed with many windows, gated and safe from fathers and ogres and other intruders … I imagined ...
A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS by Sasha Sokolov translated by Alexander Boguslawski New York Review Books, 208 pages reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke A School for Fools does not immediately strike a modern reader as new or groundbreaking; its central premise is that the narrator, a male youth attending a school for the insane, is unreliable, territory well-tread by canonized authors and Intro-to-Fiction students alike. Perhaps the original novel by Sasha Sokolov preceded (or at least coincided with the origin of) the pervasive cliché of the asylum story, having first been published in 1976, but a reader of this new translation by Alexander Boguslawski can hardly be blamed for her skepticism after glancing at the book’s back-cover blurb. As the asylum motif becomes apparent in the text (the speaker and his alter ego discuss appointments with Dr. Zause, interrupt each other, etc.), trepidation is unavoidable. In context, the image of a looming institution, while predictable, makes some sense in A School for Fools. Born in Canada in 1943, Alexander (Sasha) Sokolov grew up in the USSR after his father was deported from the West for espionage. Over the years, he made several attempts to escape the Soviet Union to no avail; ...
A SLEEPLESS MAN SITS UP IN BED by Anthony Seidman Eyewear Publishing, 63 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne When Oswald de Andrade, in his Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), spoke of “Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality,” he might have been speaking of Anthony Seidman’s delighfully profligate A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed. The sheer exuberance and sense of endless imagistic invention is exhaustive and vivifying. Each word is a firecracker thrown at your head, as you run through a maze—both mystic and vulgar, blissful and grotesque, enjoying a scary magic that leaves you rapt. To travel at the speed of light you must become sun chafed under the weight of a stone, air glistening in a rope of water unraveling from a clay jug, and noon’s sizzling flash on cars rattling over potholes. Frequent use of anaphora creates not so much meter as a strong and rudely rhythmic sense of chanting. The door of fire is a harpsichord of blood. The door of fire is palm leaves thrown supplicant at the hooves of a goat. The door of fire is hope in a maguey thorn. The door ...
A STAB IN THE DARK by Facundo Bernal translated by Anthony Seidman LARB Classics, 2019 reviewed by Johnny Payne Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver What is good poetry? Is it what the masses decide? (Not that there are really any masses reading poetry.) Or do the arbiters of taste (other poets, professional poet-critics like me) get the last word? Gertrude Stein is one of the early practitioners of that ungainly creature, often misbegotten, and difficult to evaluate sub-genre known as the prose poem: If they tear a hunter through, if they tear through a hunter, if they tear through a hunt and a hunter, if they tear through different sizes of the six, the different sizes of the six which are these, a woman with a white package under one arm and a black package under the other arm and dressed in brown with a white blouse, the second etc. One imagines this first existing as a notebook, non-committal if tending toward provisional completion, then, as Stein might put it, becoming what it became. In his most explosive work, Trilce, César Vallejo’s more formally complex poems are not necessarily more ambitious than those done in prose, in which ...
A TYRANNY of PETTICOATS: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers & Other Badass Girls edited by Jessica Spotswood Candlewick Press, 347 pages reviewed by Leticia Urieta In her introduction to the anthology, A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers and other Badass Girls, editor and author, Jessica Spotswood, describes her longtime interest in the study of history as something “tactile and ever present,” beyond dates and facts. Spotswood acknowledges the problematic nature of historical writings in the past: “Despite their many contributions, women— especially queer women, women of color, and women with disabilities—have too often been erased from history.” Her acknowledgement captures the spirit of the book; the need to give women authors a chance to fill this absence, and tell the complex stories of young women that mainstream history has forgotten. Spotswood has collected fifteen authors, including herself, to contribute short stories that reflect the perspectives of girls across different time periods of American history, starting from 1710 and ending in 1968. The collection spans different regions, cultures, classes and linguistic traditions. As a writer, I can imagine the challenges these authors faced to create this wonderful array of stories, to compress the unique ...
A WORKING WOMAN by Elvira Navarro translated by Christina MacSweeney Two Lines Press, 189 pages reviewed by Melanie Erspamer “She wanted […] the location of her madness to be now the location of her art.” This is how the narrator of The Working Woman analyzes her roommate, but the same can be said of the narrator herself, and perhaps as well of the only figure in this postmodernist novel who actually “speaks:” the author, Elvira Navarro. The text becomes the conjunction of madness and art, which share one abstract and yet delineated “location,” madness needing expression through art, or art uniquely poised to express madness. I may have gotten ahead of myself; I haven’t introduced the novel properly. The work itself forfeits any loyalty to structure or linearity in favor of a narrative that prioritizes aesthetic backways and internality. It is a quiet, decisively not flashy postmodernist masterpiece, a book packed with subtlety and originality that still manages to give insight into contemporary society. Navarro has received various honors in Spain and around the world, including the IV Premia Tormenta for best new author and inclusion on Granta’s list of the 22 best writers in the Spanish language under 35-years-old ...
A WORLD BETWEEN by Emily Hashimoto Feminist Press, 440 pages reviewed by Ashira Shirali Let’s be honest—the chances of walking into a bookstore and finding a literary lesbian romance are low. You’re more likely to find an entire cookbook consisting of sourdough recipes. If you want the book to feature characters of color, your odds sink even lower. Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel promises to fill this lacuna. A World Between (Feminist Press, September 2020) follows the relationship between two women of color, Leena and Eleanor, through college and adulthood. The novel alternates between Leena’s and Eleanor’s perspectives, revealing the yearnings and anxieties of each as they grow apart and together. There is much to marvel at in this debut. Hashimoto is adept at plotting. She pulls Leena and Eleanor apart with narrative developments that are both unexpected and believable. The novel heightens tension as we long for the two’s reunion despite circumstances, family expectations, and their own struggles. Eleanor and Leena’s conflicts are heartbreakingly realistic. Their fights remind us that in real life there are no villains or heroes, just two people whose earnest feelings clash. Hashimoto deploys details masterfully. She can bring characters to life with just a handful ...
AARDVARK TO AXOLOTL by Karen Donovan Etruscan Press, 91 pages TALES FROM WEBSTER’S: The Verminous Resuscitator and the Monsignor in the Zoot Suit by John Shea Livingston Press, 222 pages reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch My son’s name begins with G, and so any other word containing the letter, or especially starting with it, brings him immense joy. “G! For me!” he exclaims as we take the Girard exit off I-95. He is three-and-a-half, not able to read but conversant in consonants and their sounds. G-words exist on a higher plane than all others in his toddler cosmology. To any adult, this identification with a specific letter of the alphabet likely seems arbitrary. The soft G in Girard doesn’t even sound like the hard G in his name. And yet I suspect I’ve unconsciously favored a Marissa or a Megan over someone equally deserving who didn’t happen to have an M in common with me. Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin called this preference the name-letter effect; psychologists at the University of Michigan even concluded that people are more likely to donate to hurricane relief when the storms share their initials. Just as we may accidentally act on a preference for ...
ABDUCTING A GENERAL by Patrick Leigh Fermor NYRB, 206 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie In 1933, aged only 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Clad in an old greatcoat and a pair of hobnail boots, he had left his native England on the deck of a Dutch steamer and set off on foot with a few letters of introduction, some notebooks, and a copy of Horace's Odes in his rucksack, It was an extraordinary thing to undertake but we've long known that Leigh Fermor was an extraordinary man; a skilled linguist, a vivid, ebullient writer, and a lover of literature, people, and the world in all its variable wonder—of life, essentially—he has become celebrated for enjoying an existence so improbably charmed that his travel books often read like stirring, romantic fictions. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Leigh Fermor—then living in Romania—returned home and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the Irish Guards, a posting he quickly came to regard as dull. It was with some relief, then, when the Intelligence Corps took note of his lingustic capabilities and offered him courses in military intelligence and interrogation before dispatching him, in ...
ADIÓS TO MY PARENTS by Héctor Aguilar Camín translated by Chandler Thompson Schaffner Press, 304 pages reviewed by Kim Livingston Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Adiós To My Parents is a universal family story. Although the setting (Mexico, Belize, Guatemala) is unfamiliar to me—I’ve lived in the Chicago suburbs all of my fifty-one years and, regrettably, have taken only one Spanish class—the people in this book are so richly drawn that I know them instantly. For example, I recognize the author’s maternal grandmother, a cranky old woman who’s come for a rare visit: “When she’s upset with [my younger brother], she says: ‘I’m going to crack you one.’ By which she means she’ll slap him, but to Luis Miguel this sounds like sugar cracker, and he replies: ‘So let me have it.’” Every family has these stories, the ones we bring out when we’re all together again, so we can laugh at the old days and remember those who are gone. But Aguilar goes deeper than most do at the kitchen table. As readers we learn about his grandmother’s childhood in Spain, her move to Cuba, and her life-long expectation that she’ll end up back in Spain. We know ...
ADUA by Igiaba Scego translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards New Vessel Press, 171 pages reviewed by Jodi Monster The title character of Igiaba Scego’s novel Adua is a Somali woman caught in history’s crosshairs. Born to an ambitious, mercurial man, a translator who sold his skills to the Italians during Mussolini’s pre-WWII push to expand his African empire, Adua's life is shaped by choices she didn’t make and subject to forces she can’t control. Scego, an accomplished writer and journalist who reports regularly on post-colonial migrant experiences, wants to shine a bright light on these forces. Born in Italy to Somali parents, her father having been ousted from his government post by Siad Barre’s 1969 coup, Scego has more than an academic interest in the relationship between these two countries, and in the aftereffects of Italy’s imperial violence in East Africa. Born in Italy to Somali parents, her father having been ousted from his government post by Siad Barre’s 1969 coup, Scego has more than an academic interest in the relationship between these two countries, and in the aftereffects of Italy’s imperial violence in East Africa. In the atmospheric novel she’s crafted, the circumstances of Adua’s early life ...
AFTER THE WINTER by Guadalupe Nettel translated by Rosalind Harvey Coffee House Press, 242 Pages reviewed by Robert Sorrell Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver At the beginning of Guadalupe Nettel’s newly translated novel After the Winter, twenty-five-year-old Cecilia moves from her native Oaxaca to Paris. She arrives there without the usual image of Paris as a “city where dozens of couples of all ages kissed each other in parks and on the platforms of the métro, but of a rainy place where people read Cioran and La Rochefoucauld while, their lips pursed and preoccupied, they sipped coffee with no milk and no sugar.” However, there is something usual in her expectation for Paris. “Like many of the foreigners who end up staying for ever […] with the intention, or rather, the pretext of studying a postgraduate degree,” she takes up residence across the street from Père Lachaise cemetery, final resting place of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Piaf. “At different periods in my life, graves have protected me,” Cecilia shares, and the small apartment overlooking the cemetery suits her macabre nature perfectly. Cecilia is one of the two first-person narrators in After the Winter, the other being Claudio, ...
Like Cats and Dogs, the Intimate Other   AFTERGLOW by Eileen Myles Grove Press, 224 pages THE STRANGERS AMONG US by Caroline Picard Astrophil Press, 84 pages reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker Dog people and cat people often like to stake their identities on the idea that they are starkly different from one another, but are they really so different? Regardless of species, a pet’s companion is a certain type of person who probably prefers their dog or cat to other people. In two recent books, by Eileen Myles and Caroline Picard, a dog person and a cat person, respectively, confess the closeness they feel to their pets while also marveling at the strangeness of intimacy with another kind of being. Reading both of these books together becomes a chance to deeply explore the intimate otherness of animal companionship. They live amongst us, but are they with us? Myles has become a bit of a public figure recently with appearances in the Amazon original program, Transparent, a show that also features their (Myles’ preferred pronoun) poetry. With this new book, Afterglow (Grove/Atlantic, 2017), Myles is as provocative as ever. The subtitle of Afterglow is ...
AGONY by Mark Beyer New York Review of Books, 173 pages reviewed by Helen Chazan It’s difficult to write about any individual Mark Beyer comic. His works return to the same characters, motifs and events, so particular to his voice that a broad description of a Beyer comic can just as easily describe his entire oeuvre. Beyer draws nihilistic stories about life going from bad to worse, usually focusing on Amy and Jordan, a couple whose life is beyond bleak. His art is childlike and dementedly unreal; bizarre forms and wonky perspectives, complemented by obsessive, handmade stippling, create an atmosphere of fanatical intensity. The language of Amy and Jordan stories are almost drab in their bluntness, adding to the overall sense of unreality. It’s a world of disaster that is both terrifying and hilarious at once. A typical Amy and Jordan panel shows the two menaced by some strange-looking knife-wielding monstrosity, arms in the air, flatly screaming “aaaahhhhh!” First and foremost, Agony is a long Amy and Jordan story. Presented in a squat, square paperback that can fit in your coat pocket, Agony is a descent into the mad, sad logic of Beyer’s universe – there are a number of ...
AGOSTINO by Alberto Moravia translated by Michael F. Moore NYRB Classics, 128 pages MR. BOARDWALK by Louis Greenstein New Door Books, 316 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin MUSEUMS OF INNOCENCE In September 1980, military officers took over the Turkish government. Soldiers arrested 500,000 people, executed some of them, and installed martial law. Ultimately, the coup ended years of political and economic instability, but most remarkably it led to Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and eventually its status as an emergent power. Gone were days of economic and cultural isolation—a shared national innocence that novelist Orhan Pamuk has so daringly and insistently memorialized in the novel Museum of Innocence (2008)—and before that in My Name is Red (2003) and the memoir Istanbul (2005). In these books he has rebuilt and recreated a deeply provincial, yet colorful and highly idiosyncratic world that otherwise was trapped in his head. This same instinct seems to motivate the author Louis Greenstein, a playwright, whose first novel, Mr. Boardwalk, was published last month by New Door Books. Greenstein’s museum of innocence is Atlantic City in the decade before 1978, when the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel was converted into Resorts International, the city’s first casino. Greenstein ...
ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 171 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman "The Irony of Nostalgia" From our Modernist forebears came an emphasis on the power of memory (think Marcel Proust). Yet they forgot to mention its overbearing sibling, nostalgia. Overbearing not only because it tends to act as “a screen not intended to hide anything–a decoration meant only to please the eye,” but also because it obscures history. In effect, it fetishizes the past. It makes Alexandria the “strange, nostalgic European landscape” of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer (translated for the first time into English by Yardenne Greenspan). One would expect an aestheticizing impulse of, as André Aciman informs in his introduction, a man who “aged ten…left his home on the Rue Delta in Alexandra” and then saw the military overthrow of King Farouk “dissolve all remnants of multi-national life in Egypt.” Alexandrian Summer is nigh a roman à clef, following the arc of the author’s life up to his fortuitous migration from this anti-Semitic cosmopolitan fantasy to Israel to join his brothers. Nonetheless, despite his intimacy with his history, Goren avoids any such pathos. All nostalgic bliss is converted to a ...
ALL FOR NOTHING by Walter Kempowski translated by Anthea Bell NYRB Classics, 368 pages reviewed by Tyson Duffy Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Every self-professed American optimist should read the oeuvre of Walter Kempowski—not that they ever will. The chronicler of brutality was never given a fair shake even by his fellow Germans, and despite strong book sales, by literary award committees. Kempowski had plenty of reasons to be angry—angry at his Nazi father whom he betrayed, at what the agonized Sebastian Haffner once called the “moral inadequacy of the German character,” at the literary world for snubbing him, and at every center of power involved in WWII: the Russians, British, Germans, Europe itself. The triumphant Soviets—without whom WWII could not have been won—were responsible for imprisoning Kempowski as well as his innocent and elderly mother. The Allies, whom Kempowski had risked his life to aid, did nothing to help him once the war was over. He rotted in prison for eight years of a twenty-five-year sentence and never saw his mother again. “Again and again,” he wrote, not long before his death and less than two years after the Iraq War began, “there will be pictures of war ...
ALL OF YOU ON THE GOOD EARTH by Ernest Hilbert Red Hen Press, 96 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure In her classic “Some Notes on Organic Form,” Denise Levertov argues that “Rhyme, chime, echo, reiteration…not only serve to knit the elements of an experience but often are the very means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or circling of perception can be transmuted into language, ap­perceived.” When a formal poem is doing its job well, it couldn’t exist in any other way. In All of You on the Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert takes on the sonnet form with every poem. At their best, Hilbert’s poems use that form to full advantage, revealing depths of meaning that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Take a poem like “Drift,” which describes of timelessness and isolation, a purgatory. The poem begins in suspension: The sky is warm and heavy before rain. You throw down anchors. They till lines in soft Clay, blooming muddy clouds. You sometimes slow, Sometimes speed, as you pass forest and plain. We are caught in the moment of waiting. The sky doesn’t clear, the rain doesn’t come. The anchors produce mud—not quite water, not ...
ALL THAT MAN IS by David Szalay Graywolf Press, 362 pages reviewed by Ryan K. Strader In an interview with NPR, David Szalay pointed out that the title of his novel, All that Man Is, can be read two different ways: “either as a sort of slightly disparaging, sort of all that man is, and this is it. Or it can be read as a sort of almost celebratory—everything, all the kind of great variety of experience that life contains.” Szalay seems to see his work as falling somewhere in between, not entirely “disparaging” nor precisely “celebratory,” since it is a study of men dealing with situations of personal crisis. While many reviewers have described All that Man Is as bleak and depressing, Szalay confesses that he might have a “lower expectation of life than the average.” Whether the story is bleak or not, Szalay’s masterful writing has won All that Man Is significant international recognition, including being a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Britain’s 2016 Gordon Burn Prize, and it was listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2016. Szalay is Canadian-born and currently lives in Budapest, but lived most ...
ALL THE FIERCE TETHERS by Lia Purpura Sarabande Books, 128 pages reviewed by David Grandouiller Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver It’s hard to find communion with a living thing in winter. Anyone with a burrow crawls in, wraps their tail around their eyes. The other night, when snow had just started falling, I braved the interstate on my way to another city, to share a friend’s burrow. Some black ice spun me around, and I slid off the road, stopped in the median, my tread marks looping back through the new snow like a confused shadow. I’m fine, thanks. I didn’t turn around, kept driving, couldn’t bear missing a chance not to be alone. The car’s fine, too, just brown all over from the dirt I scooped up. I haven’t washed it yet. I like chauffeuring dirt around the city, an unanswered text message from the world of matter: I’m still here. Spring is coming, and with it a new book by the poet and essayist Lia Purpura, All the Fierce Tethers. These essays are the kind of encounters I’d drive in bad weather for. Some are a lot like the heat of another warm body in a ...
ALMOST EVERYTHING VERY FAST by Christopher Kloeble translated by Aaron Kerner Graywolf Press, 306 pages reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier Like the best coming-of-age stories, Christopher Kloeble’s Almost Everything Very Fast addresses universal concerns by asking personal questions. Nineteen-year-old Albert, raised in an orphanage, wants to know why he was given up by his anonymous mother and the father he knows: Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes, a grown man with a childlike mind. Albert has gotten nowhere by following the “Hansel and Gretel crumbs” he’s found in Fred’s attic: a photo of Fred with a red-haired woman, a few auburn hairs plucked from a comb. When Fred’s terminal illness imposes an urgent deadline, Albert visits him in Königsdorf one last time—but his “infinite questions” lead to still more questions: What is love? In what ways do family ties bind us? Is nurturing natural? Do parents cause their children more harm than good? In Segendorf, Fred’s ancestral village, to love is to discard. For nearly 400 years, residents have been compelled to hurl their Most Beloved Possessions off the rocky bluff of the highest hill at the annual Sacrificial Festival. During one such celebration in 1912, incestuous (and murderous) twins Jasfe and Josfer Habom ...
AMERICAN GRAMOPHONE by Carey McHugh Augury Books, 72 pages reviewed by Clare Paniccia In approaching Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone, one might first consider this question: What is the song of America, or American culture? It’s easy to jump to the obvious conclusions—the United States has strongly defined itself through its velocity, whether in industry, technology, or commercial growth, and its music has become largely representative of these themes, with contemporary pop artists representing the almost-electric shine of the digital age, rock bands highlighting the working-class, and country groups crooning over the “loss” of an easy-going, slow-paced lifestyle. Beneath these surface associations, however, McHugh challenges our initial question with a more stripped-down idea—what if America’s song isn’t something you can quickly flip to on a radio? What if America’s song is something that deviates completely from the mainstream—something pared to its most visceral form: an instrumental, organic, and natural tone? Think of the vibrating note of a fiddle, the deep strum of a guitar, and bare, haunting vocals. The sounds of folk and Americana that seem to eek out of valleys, creeks, and forgotten forests—quietly shivering their way into the undercurrent of the American everyday. These are the notes that wind from ...
AMERICAN SONGBOOK by Michael Ruby Ugly Duckling Presse, 144 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz Imagine a road trip across America, probably in the summer, “in the good old plastic gasoline / Pell-mell summertime.” Of course, music will be an essential part of the journey, probably radio hits. Headed East, perhaps, the lyrics of each song traverse both geography and time: a path paved in words. The lyrics to these songs linger in memory, but they’re also so ephemeral—though the words remain, their thrill often fades along with the little experiential details that make any such trip unique. Between the transient intensity of experience and the permanence of a material archive, exists poetry, transcription of verbal and nonverbal song on a page, lending it a more lasting presence. Each poem in Ruby’s latest collection, American Songbook, riffs on or responds to a canonical piece of American pop music, and appears chronologically, spanning the American radio-waves from the 1930s (Bessie Smith’s “Pinchbacks” to the cusp of the twenty first century (Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana’s “Smooth”). This sequence of poems presents a narrative of personal experience, but the individual experience of pleasure in pop music is at the same time an ...
AMONG STRANGE VICTIMS by Daniel Saldaña París, translated by Christina MacSweeney Coffee House Press, 320 pages reviewed by Lillian Brown Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims, translated by Christina MacSweeney, immediately pulls the reader into its universe. It does so with such thorough and seamless skill that the reader becomes a victim of this strange, off-kilter world. While it’s initially easy to get lost trying to find the meaning, or premise in general, of the series of peculiar events that passes throughout the novel, the ride is worth the suspension of belief. What starts with a proposal in the form of a note, at first presumably left by a snarky, administrative coworker, becomes the catalyst in the marriage of Rodrigo and Cecilia, and the kickstarter for the novel’s bizarre happenings, wherein a group of lonely and bored people seek answers for the inexplicable in the everyday. The eccentric cast features Rodrigo, the self-proclaimed “useless husband” and once mediocre museum worker turned collector of tea bags and savior of hens; Cecilia, his secretary wife with an attachment to her tiger-striped bedspread; Adela, Rodrigo’s mother, an academic, and the lover of Marcelo, a philosopher who takes a sabbatical (he is a ...
AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 306 pages reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck Do Roy and Celestial have an ordinary American marriage? The title of Tayari Jones’ fourth novel implies that perhaps they do in fact have a quintessential American life, and in many ways they do… Roy and Celestial are newlyweds. He grew up in Louisiana, to a blue-collar family. He worked hard, studied harder, earned his way into Morehouse College in Georgia, and went on to become a business executive. She, a talented visionary born and raised in the Peach State, grew up in a comfortable family. She excelled at a neighboring liberal arts college for women and now makes her income as a successful artisan. Together, they exemplify the Dream--thriving and very much in love. Early on, Jones paints a picture for the reader, through Roy: ...we kissed like teenagers, making out under the bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free. About a year after their wedding day, the couple decides to drive across the South to visit Roy’s family in Louisiana. In the dead of ...
AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY by Dot Devota Noemi Press, 80 pages reviewed by Julia Paganelli Newly single for the first time in three years, I found myself claiming both the titles of housewife and provider: dish-washer and bill-payer, cook and changer of lightbulbs. My mother, on telephone calls, “hints” that she needs grandbabies—and soon. She says things like, “You know you want kids.” I backpedal. I won’t have time with all the poetry gigs I’ll have. I want to live in a dangerous place; I’m not sure where yet. I converted, and I want to become a nun—when? You know…yesterday. She says things like, “I hope you have a child as stubborn as you are.” Dot Devota, in her book, And the Girls Worried Terribly, puts aside marriage to man, woman, or God and marries self to self. Through bizarre and delightful celebration imagery, Devota leads us to conception through physical and mental violence. Devota’s title has been carefully selected from a caption in Oliver Statler’s The Black Ship Scroll. In this historical work, Statler writes of an instance when Japanese singing girls were to have their photographs taken by foreigners, “and the girls worried terribly,” that “the soul ...
AND WIND WILL WASH AWAY by Jordan A. Rothacker Deeds Publishing, 376 Pages reviewed by William Morris Detective Jonathan Wind is not a wisecracking, hardboiled investigator in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, or a hyper-observant sleuth like Sherlock Holmes. Rather, Wind uses his almost encyclopedic knowledge to investigate crimes for the Atlanta Police Department. When he’s not on a case, the protagonist of Jordan A. Rothacker’s And Wind Will Wash Away splits his time between Monica, his devout Catholic girlfriend, and his secret mistress, Flora, a goddess-worshipping sex worker. All of this changes when, one early morning, Detective Wind gets a call from his partner, notifying him of a new case. The victim turns out to be his lover, Flora Ross, and her body has been burned to ash in an otherwise undamaged apartment. The police are satisfied to call the woman’s death accidental, the result of some electrical mishap, but Jonathan Wind isn’t so sure. He takes it upon himself to investigate the case in secret, going against department policy, and withholding the fact of his relationship to the victim all the while. In his quest for truth, Detective Wind encounters “an albino midget dressed in all white […] ...
ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND by Box Brown First Second Books, 240 pages reviewed by Brian Burmeister For a generation of professional wrestling fans, Andre Roussimoff was a giant, both as a man (he stood seven-feet, four-inches tall and weighed 500 pounds) and as an icon (he was one of the most successful and beloved wrestlers of all time). In telling Andre’s story, author/illustrator Box Brown did his homework. A life-long fan of professional wrestling, Brown draws upon interviews with those who personally knew Andre as well archival footage in an effort to show a complete and accurate portrayal of Andre’s life in and out of the ring. Throughout Andre the Giant’s pages we see Andre as a young boy growing up in the French countryside, Andre as an up-and-comer in the professional wrestling circuit, and finally Andre the globe-trekking celebrity. Along the way, Brown gives life to dozens of anecdotes about the wrestler, moments ranging from playful to painful but always compelling and curious. For those less familiar with professional wrestling, Brown takes pains to make the material accessible. Throughout the course of the narrative, he includes a preface in which he imparts to the reader a useful ...
ANOTHER MAN'S CITY by Choe In-Ho translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton Dalkey Archive (Library of Korean Literature), 190 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster As I'm writing this, the rain is beginning. The spattering sounds of drops hitting the fat, broad maple leaves on the tree outside my window catch my ear like static. The rain turns on the rich, dirt smell of the ground and dampens the sound of passing traffic. My neighbor, who plays the piano for the Portland Opera, is practicing some Brahms and singing out the notes as he plays them. This is my place. Do I think I belong here because my senses interpret it as “mine,” and I'm attached to the reality I identify as “mine,” or do I belong in any old place, whether I recognize my surroundings or not? This impossible question is the crux of Choe In-Ho's novel Another Man's City. I walked into it expecting something bizarre, futuristic, and possibly a bit whimsical. But this is not The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Instead, I ended up in one of Philip K. Dick's amphetamine dreams. “Every train station displays a timetable,” he writes, For the public, it's a kind ...

letters