Before we even crack its cover, Rick Snyder’s first full-length, Escape from Combray, promises action. As the title references the hometown of Proust’s memorable, nameless front man, so does it hint at themes of origin and transience. Over the course of nearly 40 lean poems Snyder positions his voice as one at the stitch of our collar.
Joanna Howard’s dizzying tales of drowned sailors, glowing specters, reclusive dandies, and roguish pursuers start like the strike of a match: they ignite in an instant to a dazzling flame and then just as suddenly die out.
In Lydia Millet’s BOMB Interview with Jonathan Lethem, Millet speaks of her captivation with animals, saying “Animals are like rock stars, they have that charisma.” In Millet’s new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, she treats animals as rock star characters, paralleling them with real-life celebrities to create stories both eccentric and, in unexpected ways, honest.
A throwback to the great Faulknerian family sagas, Lying with the Dead is populated by characters obsessed with the traumas lurking in their pasts.
Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s book Notes On Conceptualisms is one of the first books to take on the term “conceptualism” in relation to recent practices in contemporary poetry, offering a preliminary textbook on the subject. There is a lot to unpack in this tiny book (the book is pocket-size, and comes to 76 pages). One of the first things a reader notices is the book’s organization through “notes.”
There’s a frustration I face with modern photography—glossy spreads in magazines and head shots and landscapes. With the advent of Photoshop, everything just looks too perfect.
“What, at this point in time, can we make of a man,” the narrator of Jacques Jouet’s most recent novella, Savage, asks himself.
Little Fingers by Filip Florian is a “novel about a little town and a big discovery.” In present-day Romania, a mass grave, “a torrent of human bones that had not fallen from the heavens like rain, but emerged from the earth near a subsided wall,” is happened upon.
Reviewers often compare short story writer and novelist Jean Thompson to Canada’s Alice Munro. And although none of the dozen stories in her latest collection, Do Not Deny Me, possess the life spanning scope that is so often prevalent in Munro’s work, Thompson does match Munro in how easily they both handle very diverse characters.
Gay men and divas—divas and gay men. Has there ever been a more combustible, unflappable combination? From an arena full of men convulsing to the thumping beats and candy-colored lights at a Madonna concert to a pocket of theater queens reveling in the high camp of Judy Garland’s legacy, the cultural phenomenon of the relationship between the gay community and the women they love has become just as iconic as these over-the-top sirens themselves.
It was best not to ask and tie him straight to the pole. He gravitated toward it regardless the moment he was caught. “Cuff me,” he seemed to say. It was late in the summer of ’86 when Ricky Dyson and I discovered the pole in my parents’ garage and binding each other to it with old strands of jump rope. A good tie-up or a tap on the back of your bike wheel with the big red whiffle ball bat was the punishment for speeding down the driveway.
The Great Perhaps is structured around a deceptively simple quest. Scientist Jonathan Casper wants to understand why our world is so complex and somehow make it less so. To do this, he’s searching for a prehistoric squid at the ocean’s floor that may hold the key to unlocking evolution.
At times, the protagonist of Frederick Seidel’s poems appears to be delighted by an impairment of feeling, as though he would be content to comment on the world’s inhabitants from the viewer’s side of a glass case.
Never the biggest fan of public appearances — especially those which emphasized his importance—David Foster Wallace nonetheless accepted an invitation to deliver the 2005 commencement speech for Kenyon College. Much of Wallace’s work circles uneasily around the knowledge that simple, homespun cliches are actually meaningful and important once you scrape away the smug label of “common sense” that makes it hard to register what’s actually being said.
