The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
MAR 2008
Books
Graphic Novel: Hipster in a Hail of Bullets
by Aaron LeichterBooks
Hollywood has probably already bought the rights to Shooting War, by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman. After all, the book made one leap already, from free web-comic to hard-bound graphic novel.
Fiction: Reason to Prepare
by Eryn LoebBooks
Lucy Clark’s family could only exist on the page. Her mother, Isifrid, is a Viking-obsessed crack addict.
Nonfiction: I Am Not My Mother
by Rachel BalikBooks
Felicia C. Sullivan has spent her life groping for the words and images to purge the imprint of her childhood.
Fiction: Spray-Painted Mysteries
by Becky FerreiraBooks
If judged only by its synopsis, Nina Siegal’s debut novel, A Little Trouble with the Facts, would be quickly categorized as a neo-noir, a rehash of mystery/suspense structure contemporized by a slew of modern landscapes and references.
Fiction: Dangerous, Lyrical Journeys
by Yvonne GarrettBooks
Yannick Murphy has said that great prose should give readers a sense that they are going somewhere and that it could be somewhere dangerous.
Nonfiction: Top Secret Insignia, Its Place in a Book
by Erin HeathBooks
As children, some of us collected polished stones, troll dolls, and Pogs. We’ve now graduated to credit cards, broken iPods, and, sure, coins.
Poetry: A Life Sentence
by Benjamin TrippBooks
“Words are my life…” the 1930s Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky once confided, “the poet’s form is never an imposition of history, but the desirability of making order out of history as it is felt and conceived.”
Poetry: Peculiar Antennae
by David VarnoBooks
Grace Paley’s poems read nicely as first thoughts, as impressions in a journal, a pause on an afternoon stroll.
Poetry Roundup - march-08
by Jeffrey Cyphers WrightBooks
Poet in New York
Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Medina and Mark Statman, trans.
(Grove Press, 2008)
Heart Stoner Bingo
Stephanie Gray
(Straw Gate Books, 2007)
The Greener Meadow
Luciano Erba
(Princeton University Press, 2007)
Prose Roundup March 2008
by Brooklyn Rail StaffBooks
The Book of Other People
Zadie Smith, ed.
(Penguin, 2007)
Travels in the Scriptorium
Paul Auster
(Picador, 2007)
Salvage
Jane F. Kotapish
(MacAdam/Cage, 2007)
Now You See Him
Eli Gottlieb
(William Morrow, 2008)
