Vanity Fair
The essays in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs explore the many successes and admirable qualities of their author.
Reviews
2651 posts
The Rumpus Valentine’s Day Review of Drenched
[T]he universe of Marisa Matarazzo’s first book is soaked through, awash in torrential love and water.
The Plath Cabinet
Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but…
What the Girls Call ‘Murder’
A funny thing happened on the way to the “angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere”…
California Dreaming
Eric Puchner’s first novel exposes the faultlines and frustrations beneath the shining American dream.
Outside of Society
Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe chronicles two “mutinous spirits” in the chaos of 1970s New York.
The World Was Still There
John Haskell’s novel takes readers on a metaphysical journey through the mind of a Steve Martin-impersonator impersonator.
Crimson Colored Raunchiness and Terror
Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.
Stirring Coffee with a Feather
Margo Berdeshevsky’s work straddles the line between fiction and poetry. Her characters grieve, dream, punish themselves, and try to find harmony between who they are and who they might still…
The Country Where No One Ever Dies
The Albanian, in Ornela Vorpsi’s comic novel, is someone prone to megalomania, and who has one obsession “dearer to them than death… Fornication.”
The Professor
In a new book of essays, Terry Castle rips through literary and cultural allusions at breakneck speed, citing obscure folk musicians and cult novelists in the same breath.