The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
July/August 2008
Books
Photography: A World to Warhol
by Ellen PearlmanBooks
In 1982, before it was hip, fashionable, or barely possible, Andy Warhol tripped off to China with young photographer Christopher Makos, who documented the fabulous but anonymous Andy in Mao land.
Poetry Roundup
by Jeffrey Cyphers WrightBooks
Gaius Valerius Catullus…we laud the caustic wit and cloacal satirist for his love, sorrow and outsized audacity.
Poetry: Rounding Out the Edges
by Jim FeastBooks
In A Man of Letters in the Modern Age, Allen Tate makes the compelling argument that great poetry emerges at the edge of a belief system or way of living that has fallen short.
Poetry: Before- And After-Image
by Benjamin TrippBooks
Kenneth Patchen’s reputation as a proto-beatnik poet, visual artist, activist, jazz performer and all around bohemian emanates an aura of saintliness.
Fiction: Two Halves of a Whole
by Hana MaliaBooks
Messing’s debut novel unfolds in two rotating narratives of one woman’s life, one of her lonesome present and the other of her lucidly recalled childhood.
Fiction: Who, You?
by Jessica StultsBooks
The flap of your book identifies you as a “post-modern legend,” which I’m not sure how to take, so it is with some apprehension that I flip to the beginning of You.
Nonfiction: Legends from the Levant
by Mia EatonBooks
Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born journalist who immigrated to France in 1975 to escape his country’s civil war. A world-renowned novelist, essayist, historian, journalist, and librettist, Maalouf bridges East and West through his exploratory writing about Arab culture.
Nonfiction: Beauty, Old Faithful
by Marcela SilvaBooks
With his most recent theoretical construction, Eyes Upside Down, P. Adams Sitney, author of Visionary Film, reveals an intricate matrix of aesthetic attributes with Ralph Waldo Emerson as its core source.
Nonfiction: The Cold Hard Facts of Home
by Meghan RoeBooks
The scene opens with a flourish of horns, strings, and cymbals, on a panoramic strip of sun-dappled Tennessee forestland.
Nonfiction: How a Stroke Became Genius
by Bob BlaisdellBooks
Engel is a Canadian detective novelist, and one morning in the summer of 2001, as he tries to look at the newspaper, he can't recognize the letters.
Prose Roundup
by Ben Mirov, Mayra David, Jackson Taylor, and Tatiaana LaineBooks
Full of innovative stylistic flourishes and classic noir motifs, Abraham Rodriguez’s new crime novel South by South Bronx is infused with the right balance of new and old.
