Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range…
There is a moment in Junky in which a psychiatrist asks William Burroughs’ narrator why he needs narcotics. His answer is to get out of bed in the morning, to…
Visiting the Taos Pueblo (“an ancient community continuously inhabited for 100 years”) on San Geronimo Day, I was frightened by the Sacred Clowns (Koshares). The list of rules for visitors…
In Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country, Janie, the eldest daughter of a Korean immigrant family and a graduate student in mathematics, has always carried the responsibility of appeasing and protecting her…
Patrick Flanery is not South African, and neither is his debut novel, Absolution. This is not to say that Flanery does not know South Africa or its politics, history, landscape,…
Born in 1927, Willis Barnstone is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and an admired translator . His rendering of The Poems of St John of the…
Filmgoers this year who saw the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (or not) entered the prehistoric Chauvet caves of Southern France in a stunning modern way. The…
To appreciate Zona, Geoff Dyer’s twelfth book, you’ll need to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, among the most treasured and troubling movies in the history of cinema. If you’ve…
In the opening poem of Christopher Howell’s Gaze, “Home Stretch,” he concludes with, “Receive me. Here are my silver / wings, in accordance with custom. Inside of them / leaves…
“In this universe the night was falling…” So muses Clayton Bewley, the uprooted Kentuckian at the center of Terry Bisson’s latest novel Any Day Now. It’s a line Clay plucks…
“Nothing Elizabeth Ellen has ever written has ever been political, ever.” At least according to the four teenage girls in this vimeo book trailer called “A Brief Bio by Elizabeth…