Books
Fiction: Runes of Ruins
By Marina BudhosOver five years since the Twin Towers attack, we now have the term “9/11 literature.” It’s also no secret in the publishing industry that after 9/11, fiction sales began to plummet, as literary works—always a hard sell—became even harder to move off the store shelves.
In Conversation
Florence Falk with Erica Wetter
In her last address to Congress in 1892, “The Solitude of the Self,” women’s rights suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously urged, “No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone.”
The Life and Death of Translation
By Sabrina SeeligThe question of whether the world shrinks at the cost of tradition, distinct culture or individuality is oft-discussed, but one product of globalization is rarely considered: the World Literature Anthology.
Fiction: Haunted Man
By Brandon ProiaJack Pendarvis has a talent for titles. On the two separate occasions of coming across The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure (Macadam/Cage 2005) and now Your Body Is Changing (Macadam/Cage 2007), an insatiable urge to purchase and possess his books filled me, an unalloyed consumerist desire I haven’t felt since watching GI Joe cartoons in the mid 1980s.
Nonfiction: Killer Dreams
By John G. Rodwan Jr.Danny Lyon calls Like a Thief’s Dream “the story of a journalist and a thief,” but that’s not a precise description. Lyon, a photographer and filmmaker, says he did not study journalism and uses apologetic quotation marks when he calls himself a reporter.
Fiction: Song of the Post-Colonial Self
By Vijay SeshadriAt the end of each of the narratives in Kamau Brathwaite’s new book of stories DS (2): Dreamstories, the West Indian poet provides a précis of the piece’s compositional history.
