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Picture this: a curbside juggler with a rose between his teeth. That’s the opening image of Susan DeFreitas’s powerful debut novel, Hot Season. Vivid (and sometimes strange) images strike again and again, conjuring ponderosa pines, cafés, old houses, and new characters. The book is firmly set in the fictional town of Crest Top, Arizona, and […]
...moreThere’s always Stephen’s classic hangover cure, “The Cabman’s Kickstart.” Simply stare with weary ennui at a stale dinner roll while insulting a cup of coffee. Over at Melville House, resident Joyce expert and author of An Exaggerated Murder, Josh Cook, is impersonating Ulysses’s hero, Leopold Bloom, and answering your most distressing questions in a new monthly advice […]
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We think of our brains as a place. We surround thoughts with metaphors of environment.
...moreSaturday 2/28: Tom McCarthy reads Satin Island, a novel about writing the Great Report. 192 Books, 7 p.m., free. Claudia Rankine and Elizabeth Alexander read from their latest works. McNally Jackson, 7 p.m., free. Sunday 3/1: Joanna Fuhrman, Shelley Marlow, and Elissa Ball celebrate new books by Fuhrman and Marlow. Molasses Books, 8 p.m., free. […]
...moreAmazon and Hachette appear to have entered into a war of attrition, a battle that Hachette, with a more limited budget, is surely going to lose. Alone, Hachette will fall. News that Simon & Schuster easily signed a deal with Amazon was a major blow—and that might just be exactly what Amazon is counting on, […]
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Doesn’t it always start with poetry? Or at least a poet. Or at least a writer.
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Josh Cook reviews Kathleen Winters’s Nostalgia for the Criminal Past today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreIt was strange. Volume One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir/novel was, with one traumatic exception near the end, the story of a typical young man. He had a typical childhood broken up only by a typical divorce. He was a typical teenager; excesses of emotion, dreams of stardom, and experimentation with substances. Typically he […]
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Josh Cook reviews Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black today in Rumpus Poetry.
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The Word on the Street is not Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon’s first work of writing for music. He wrote librettos for four Daren Hagen operas; Shining Bow, Vera of Las Vegas, Bandanna, and The Ancient Concert and worked in rock ‘n’ roll, writing for The Handsome Family, collaborating with Warren Zevon, and playing in […]
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Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote Notturno on strips of paper big enough for just one line a piece, while his eyes were bandaged into near blindness, as he convalesced for over two months from an eye injury. As Virginia Jewiss writes in the preface, “…Notturno offers one of the most extraordinary stories of literary creation ever conceived.” […]
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Uselysses by Noel Black is a collection of five, distinct, short books of poetry. The first three books collect introspective and self-conscious poems common in contemporary poetry, distinguishing themselves with imaginative imagery and a unique sense of humor. The fourth book, Moby K. Dick, is a collection of literary mash-ups, riffs on creative collisions like […]
...moreIn Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes with something more fluid, more abstract, at a different level of reading. These “word-spirits,” delineated by tildes, congeal into an amorphous work; a floating world […]
...moreWhen Boyle is insightful, this style allows the brilliance of the insight to shine through unfiltered and unaided by the mechanisms of literature and poetry, sometimes with powerful effect.
...moreGrappling with the problems of an adolescent entering adulthood in a society skewed by violence and oppression, Adam Foulds’ narrative poem is an intellectual, visual, and sensual triumph.
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