Not so in Star,
whose pace is exponential
beginning with quiet humdrum,
breaking [perhaps he will kill himself] toward
rapidity [perhaps he will kill his girlfriend],
and ending when this hero,
very suddenly, kills no one,
returning to the same humdrum
full-circle, through the ensō.
Oscar Mardell reviews Yukio Mishima‘s Star.
The poem is named for its hero, and follows him attempting to find a companion on a website where you can buy a marriage to a ‘Slavic Beauty’, and travelling across Europe by train. The first time we encounter the character Sissy he is tucked up in bed, under a duvet cover featuring a faded map of Europe pre-1989. He’s also inside his mother, ‘like a crewman/ [i]nside a sticky hull.’ Every day he is literally reborn, sliding out of his mother with ‘horrific/ [a]bandon’; it’s an image that never quite settles and every time it is invoked causes an uncomfortable squirm, and like a lot in the poem, it looks an awful lot like a symbol, but a symbol that is resistant to interpretation.
James Tookey reviews the first Republic of Consciouness Book of the Month title, Ben Borek‘s Sissy.
In any event, a book that ties the reader up in such moral knots is a book worth reading, no matter how displeasing the reading experience may be. And it is. The characters’ illnesses are well-described, their depravities carefully delineated, their crimes docketed without fail. Enlightenment through suffering necessarily entails suffering, and this book bears a lot of it. Plus, the ideas in it are so heavy, and so imbricated, that reading the book is an intense, blinkered experience. Even if you’ve put the book down, your emotions haven’t really let go, and your mind keeps working at its contradictions.
Katharine Coldiron reviews Thirty-Seven by Peter Stenson.
In one of his most recent works, Condemned to Modernity: What Sociology Seeks, Literature Found, he attacks the argument, often made in both mainstream media and academic circles, that our globalized, digitalized economy has created a postmodern and post-industrial society whose actuality is unique to human history. In the book, he uses literature as his main weapon of attack, repeatedly asking: If this argument is correct, then how is it that we can find in some of the great literary works of the 19th and early 20th centuries — the epitome of modernity and the industrial age — precise descriptions of social and economic phenomena that are supposedly unique to our time?
Svatava Antošová on Condemned to Modernity by Jan Keller.
Diane Seuss goes high and low from the get go with a Rembrandt title (Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl) and an Amy Winehouse epigraph (What kind of fuckery is this?). The latter figure reappearing as surrogate self-daughter of the narrator’s societal fringe past involving a junkie boyfriend who haunts the poet’s previous work. This is not ego-immersed confessional poetry, it is more conversant with what Rothko called the not-self.
Steven Felicelli reviews Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss.
Phillips’ debut is ambitious. But how does it fare? It teeters on the cusp of greatness. He has taken time to think about life and the path he is navigating through it, and found solace, perhaps affirmation, in documentation and appropriation. It’s a memoirsy collection of stories and essays, recollected speeches, fragments, rants, letters-to-be-opened-in-the-case-of-death, and yet the best moments may well be the ones where he provides intentional story structure.
A. E. Weisgerber reviews Essays and Fictons by Brad Phillips.
In addition to Borges, other influences can be detected in Sierra’s “theory-fiction.” As Dan Mellamphy writes in the book’s frontispiece, J.G. Ballard and Phillip K. Dick are both ghostly presences in Sierra’s prose. One might also mention in passing names like Conrad and Nabokov, authors who often burrow into the English language like viruses from the outside, weaponizing the “Imperium of Anglophony.” And yet, the elements which make The Artifact a “theory fiction” are also what make it a wholly original and idiosyncratic work, a blend of musings on science—biology, physics, computer science—along with an impressionistic montage of fictive tales.
Javier Padilla reviews The Artifact by Germán Sierra.
The question of how this process of naming and recalling of names fits with the wider questions of testimony and silence in Dead Souls is vital for understanding how to approach these events, of what it means to create an archive of such atrocious human actions. Testimony, silendce: the two are in continual contestation throughout Dead Souls and its understanding of the film as archive.
Daniel Fraser reviews Dead Souls.
A new edition from New York Review Books makes Anthea Bell’s translation of All for Nothing – the final novel by the acclaimed German writer Walter Kempowski – available to US readers. Can the book redeem the art of monsters? Or does it fall short?
Oscar Mardell reviews All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski.
This novel’s not easy to describe / narratives are spectral / there is a man and a boy and a Connie / a body is broken down and reassembled / voices converse / “The rays stitch’d him into the shamble of hot black dust grinding, of an accumulation echo’d in dust prints.” / there is a motel / there is bricabrac / there is sand / there is cataplasm / but it’s hard to say what they are doing / what they have done / what they will do / the reader enters this space / engages the text / is pulled through each page / until the book is over /
Mike Corrao reviews Apparitions of the Living by John Trefry.
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