Books
Interview with Poet Jerry Williams "Gamblin' Man"
By Adam FitzgeraldRecently, I sat down to begin an e-mail exchange with Jerry Williams. His latest works include a collection of poetry entitled Admission (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) as well as the highly successful anthology It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup (Overlook Press, 2009)
NONFICTION
OCCUPYING W. S.
By William S. Niederkorn
Biographies of Shakespeare have always been problematic: so much to explain, so little information. Introducing his new book, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, Graham Holderness, author of some 20 books on the Bard and an English professor at the University of Hertfordshire, in Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London, acknowledges the preferred solution. Every biography of Shakespeare, he writes, “embroiders fact and tradition into a speculative composition that is, at least partly, fictional.”
FICTION
Conquering the Third Reich
By Ariell Cacciola
Roberto Bolaño’s lulling prose lends beauty to a dangerous Spanish beach community in The Third Reich, the latest of his novels to be translated by Natasha Wimmer.
NONFICTION
Snapshots of the Artist
By Chris Campanioni
In An Emergency in Slow Motion (Bloomsbury, 2011), William Todd Schultz performs a paradox. He eschews the typical biography and in doing so, illuminates his nebulous subject better than any biographer before him.
POETRY
Lo and Behole
By Alex Estes
Matvei Yankelevich traffics in words. As a translator, editor, professor, publisher, and poet, he has steeped himself in language.
POETRY
Road to Nowhere
By Jerome Murphy
“So there are rays. Strong ones, others /only splinters.” These lines from Albert Mobilio’s eerie, minor-key latest collection Touch Wood aptly describe the delirious effects a reader may experience in the passenger seat of this existential ride through a psychic terrain of “sand banks, stung with grass.”
The Stuart Sherman Spectacle
By Liz AxelrodBest know for his series of 20 short, experimental plays titled the Spectacles, Sherman led a rich existence on the fringe of the New York avant-garde contemporary art/theater scene from the late ’60s to the early ’90s.
FICTION
SUI GENERIS
By Jim Feast
Doug Nufer’s new novel By Kelman Out of Pessoa is another of his contributions to the “literature of constraint.” Certainly, all writing has constraints, but this genre involves an author piling on heavier, if self-imposed, restrictions to challenge his mettle.
POETRY
Answers Without Questions
By Jerome Murphy
“In reality, the sky isn’t far from or near the land,” Cesar Vallejo will write with typically laconic dream-logic before noting, as an afterthought: “In reality, death isn’t far from or close to life.”
ANTHOLOGY
The Burqa Unveiled
By John Emrys Eller
Love, InshAllah couples romance and faith with 25 real stories of the “secret love lives of American Muslim women.”
MEMOIR
Extravagant Blooms
By Jenine Holmes
Unlike most memoirs, Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place reads like a poignant fable. Wainaina deeply cares about his odyssey, the journey of a Kenyan boy who, ultimately, becomes an internationally lauded writer. He also wants readers to care about a region of the world most Westerners believe they are familiar with but, sadly, are not.
A PORNOGRAPHER BARES ALL
SAM BENJAMIN with Winston Len
By Winston Len
American Gangbang: A Love Story (Gallery Books, 2011) is a wickedly funny book chronicling Sam Benjamin’s journey from Brown University, where he studied postmodern theory and media, into the world of pornography. Benjamin and Winston Len met up over coffee in the West Village recently to discuss his experience.
FICTION
Double Jackpot
By Jenine Holmes
Baby Geisha, Trinie Dalton’s latest work of fiction, is closer to a cool bar with well-traveled, wacky patrons you’d want to eavesdrop on or chat up over cocktails.
The Dreaming Girl
By Suzanne McConnellRoberta Allen’s lyrical novel, The Dreaming Girl, follows one of the richest and most common of plots: Two people meet, fall in love, and either remain together or part.
