The Drugs Do Work
Strange, surreal and occasionally macabre, the new short-fiction anthology The Speed Chronicles offers a primer on a class of illicit substances—and a category of human experience—at once painful and joyous.
Reviews
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Fitzgerald’s Lost Road Trip
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long-lost account, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, follows Zelda and Scott on an eventful road trip in the 1920s.
The Garden, Disseminated, Overgrown
Out of reverence for the body’s irreducibility, Mort’s keeps strictly close to the phenomenal world, thereby freeing her imagination to honor all the body’s modes: five-fold sensuality, hunger as well…
Their Faces Blur in Every Mirror
Darling writes with incredible crispness, but the world she describes remains cold, stark, upper-class, and difficult to relate to.
These Veins of Leaf, Hand, Storm and Stream
Ideally, critics and teachers are humbled by their vocations and the artistry the vocations expose them to, encouraging effort to stay fresh , emotionally resonant and intellectually worthwhile. Say yes…
Somewhere Below the Solar Plexus of Her
What does it take for a person to kill a living thing, then a human being? Why are the truths of war silenced?
Toteninsel in English
New in English, Gerhard Meier’s 1979 Isle of the Dead recalls W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as two friends traverse their town, discussing nature and death in elegant prose.
Books as Fetish Objects
Unpacking My Library introduces a new sub-genre to coffee table books: library porn.
What Part Are You Now?
Harrison’s style is spare and evocative, more expressive than Hemingway but less misogynistic, more accessible than Thoreau. Honest.
Against an Ethical Machine
Rejected by the early Soviet state, Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky published only nine stories in his lifetime; luckily his novel The Letter Killers Club is now available in English.
It’s Pigsty I
Nomura plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza.