Brian Morton, known best for his novels Florence Gordon, Breakable You, and Starting Out in the Evening (the latter of which was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award), has turned his skill to a book on craft. Morton, a Guggenheim fellow and winner of the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts . . .
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In Issa Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, the unnamed narrator mythologizes a series of figuresthat he directly or indirectly encounters, including a disgraced teacher and the student he seduced and forever changed; a lonely bus driver in Boston; a disabled landlord who mourns the lesbian aunt his family abandoned; and other strangely compelling . . .
Read MoreA Review of Eighteenth in Line to the Throne by James Tate (Press Brake 2025) Ten years have passed since the death of the poet James Tate, but in that time something remarkable has happened: already there have been two posthumous publications of his work, starting with The Government Lake: Last Poems . . .
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A review of We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey The anthology We Are Not Numbers, The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, published by Interlink Books today, is a collection of essays by young Palestinian writers in Gaza, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam . . .
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Back in the mid-eighties, for those of us who studied the dark arts of ninja theory in the Parisian dojos of Derrida and Deleuze, S/Z by Roland Barthes was a seminal scripture. One of many keys it offered was its lesson that books don’t have to read from beginning to end—that, instead, . . .
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By naming her collection Civil Twilight, Cynthia Huntington situates us in a narrow interval—the few minutes when the sun hovers zero to six degrees below the horizon. Any higher and it’s daytime. One degree lower is twilight of a different kind. Concerned as it is with precision, however, Huntington’s title also creates . . .
Read MoreA Review of Salt House by Hazel Hawthorne An early twentieth-century literary darling of the Outer Cape (and a descendent of Nathaniel Hawthorne), Hazel Hawthorne and her second husband, Morris S. Werner, spent many years living and working between New York and Provincetown. From the back cover of her 1934 novel Salt . . .
Read MoreFruit cannot dropthrough this thick air—H.D. Whether Celsius or Centigrade,It’s damned hot in these late summer days!Yet you’ll cool (even smile)When you drink dog days style.Here are beers that provide liquid shade. 1You’ll keep cool with this wintry White Beard,A translucent white ale to keep near.Beat the heat (and repeat)With this lemony . . .
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When she was 28, Jessica Slice quite literally stumbled into disability while on a hike in Greece with her then-husband. Tired and hot after an hour-long trek, they turned a corner and were confronted by a pack of wild dogs. Though they managed to avoid attack by backing away and scrambling up . . .
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A Review of On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies by Jennifer Nelson “Surrect” has been used twice in English. Once in 1692 by Leonard Plukenet, the English botanist, in a letter to John Ray, also a botanist, comparing Polygonum minus candicans supinum to Paronychia hispanica. (“Which is a more . . .
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