Quarterly Conversation

The Last Supper by Pawel Huelle

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:03:15 +0000

The Last Supper, Pawel Huelle (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Serpent’s Tale. 256pp, $14.95. The premise of Pawel Huelle’s new novel is simple: An artist invites twelve of his friends to his studio in order to take a photo recreating Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” No one is told which disciple he is going to be; in [...]

Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:32:37 +0000

Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez. Dzanc Books. 177pp, $16.95. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. —Clov, from Endgame by Samuel Beckett In his second novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez once again taps a deeply comedic voice to record a [...]

Waste by Eugene Marten

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:07:32 +0000

Waste, Eugene Marten. Ellipsis Press. 132pp, $10.00. Eugene Marten’s Waste is blurbed up by the Lish School (including Lish himself) so I was expecting a quirkily written, intelligent effort more concerned with the structures of its sentences than narrative cohesion; what I got is a brutal, disturbing little novel that works beautifully both for those who [...]

A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:51:13 +0000

A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter. Knopf. 608pp, $30.00. The title of Elaine Showalter’s book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx refers to a 1917 short story by Susan Glaspell that tells of two women who discover potentially incriminating evidence against another woman whose husband has been [...]

Comrades by Marco Antonio Flores

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:44:57 +0000

Comrades, Marco Antonio Flores (trans. Leona Nickless). Aflame Books. 300pp, $16.95. In 1976, the Guatemalan writer Marco Antonio Flores published his first novel, Los Compañeros. The book was a feverish, kaleidoscopic communiqué from inside the revolutionary armed struggle of his country, a movement in which he had been a devoted participant only a few years earlier. [...]

Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt

admin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:57:50 +0000

Ray of the Star, Laird Hunt. Coffee House Press. 192pp, $14.95. Ray of the Star opens with two nods in the direction of French writer Georges Perec. The first, a quotation from his 1967 novel A Man Asleep, serves as entry to the story: Now you must learn how to last. A man named Harry has [...]

Manifesto: New Aestheticism

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:28:49 +0000

(Editor’s note: This essay accompanies an interview with Damion Searls on new ways of looking at fiction.) Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful. It differs [...]

The Other Half of Moby-Dick: The Damion Searls Interview

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:21:42 +0000

Discussed in this interview: • ; or The Whale, by Herman Melville, edited by Damion Searls. Dalkey Archive Press. $8.00. • Moby Dick in Half the Time, by Herman Melville. Orion Books. $9.95, 336pp. Notoriously lengthy, difficult, and full of bizarre digressions, Moby-Dick practically invites abridgement. It was no surprise then when Orion Books did just that, offering [...]

Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill

admin — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:57:40 +0000

Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill. Yale University Press. 288pp, $35.00. Let us begin with the cover, a proverbially dubious strategy for assaying the worth of a book. An aging, cannonball-domed man of ruddy complexion glares at the reader, his head filling most of the frame. His white beard is a day or two out of trim. The [...]

Said and Done by James Morrison

admin — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:56:59 +0000

Said and Done, James Morrison. Black Lawrence Press. 240pp, $16.00. Recently trapped at the beach, thinking about the concept of “summer reading”—a sort of intentional intellectual ghetto—flipping through some magazine (People, I think), I ran across a line slagging story collections. The article began with a general nod to the universal unpleasantness of reading them: too [...]