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POETRY
Making Panic

Angela Veronica Wong’s first full-length poetry collection, how to survive a hotel fire, exists within the rush and vacuum following an alarm: those split-seconds, or split-months, as the case may be, of confusion and action and error and clarity, in which memory is rewound, replayed, and questioned.

FICTION
Going Off the Deep End

Zoe Fishman’s novel Saving Ruth is a recent example of what publishers have called “New Adult” fiction: stories treating that sticky time of life between college and adulthood when full-fledged independence is still scary and not necessarily better than the familiar comforts of home.

BENJAMIN TAYLOR In Conversation with Adam Fitzgerald

Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of sitting down at an Italian restaurant in the West Village and asking Benjamin Taylor—author of two novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even, and recent editor of Saul Bellow: Letters—about his new book, Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a genre-bending travelogue that is part memoir, part history, part distillation of how ancient myths continue to shape our inner lives.

In Conversation

PETER M. WHEELWRIGHT with Scott Cheshire

Peter Wheelwright is now officially a Renaissance man, a real triple threat. This is not to say he’s a song-and-dance man. Then again it seems there is nothing the man cannot do.

In Conversation

JOHNNY TEMPLE with Justin Courter

In 1996, with money from his band’s record deal with a major label, Johnny Temple founded Akashic Books and published The Fuck Up, a novel by Arthur Nersesian. It’s been almost a decade since then, but don’t think for a second Akashic has mellowed into a more genteel version of its gutsy original incarnation—or forgotten the F-word.

In Conversation

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER with Mandy Keifetz

Craig Morgan Teicher and I are of a tribe. We live a block and a half apart, take our coffee and cake at the same local grocery. Our kids play in the same South Brooklyn playground and we take many of our meals and beers at the same slightly-less-divey-than-it-used-to-be bar.

FICTION
A Double Life

Let us now praise Paula Bomer. Nine Months, her debut novel and follow-up to her celebrated story collection Baby, is a masterful portrait of the brilliant and frustrated artist/mother figure living in contemporary Park Slope, Brooklyn.

ART
Deep in the Heart of Art

Danger plus beauty equals glory. Recognize. And these murals, created illegally in the bowels of the New York City transit system, are thrilling. Painted in an abandoned subway station four stories down, they epitomize the potency of the “underground.”

FICTION
Alices Through the Looking Glass

If summer blockbusters are any sign, we’re as far from female protagonism as we were before the publication of the Second Sex. Heroes in our minds continue to be young and male.

CRITICISM
Dyer About Tarkovsky About Desire

Imagine a domain absent of cliché, gratuitous explosions, and Russell Brand, and enter Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. Zona is a meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, and similar to the Zone in Stalker, is a sanctuary untouched by genre and traditional narrative.

POETRY
Ethos, Ethics

Stephen Motika’s Western Practice is a vast poetic anthropology, or archeology. It is a “kulture vulture,” trying to “tell us the culture” through its “description of collections” and “directories.”

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The Brooklyn Rail

SEPT 2012

All Issues