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on New Music Titles by Jas Obrecht, Will Friedwald, Fred Hersch, and Lilian Terry
This year has been rich with engaging, insightful music titles – Ben Ratliff’s Every Song Ever, Robbie Robertson’s Testimony, Ted Gioia’s How To Listen to Jazz, David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, Elaine Hayes’ Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan, and Anthony DeCurtis’ Lou Reed: A Life come to…
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In Brief: on Edan Lepucki’s Woman No. 17, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Feminism, Domenico Starnone’s Ties, & newly found photos by Weegee
“I’m keenly interested in the ways in which parents and their children don’t understand each other,” said Edan Lepucki in an interview at the time her rewarding second novel, Woman No. 17, was published earlier this year. The story is told alternately by Lady Daniels, a mother of two children who has just separated from…
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on Marlena, a novel by Julie Buntin
The death of Marlena Joyner – perhaps by drowning, perhaps not – is revealed at the outset of Julie Buntin’s first novel Marlena. The story is told by Catherine or “Cat,” a 32-year old librarian in New York who recalls a mere eight-month period that had occurred 18 years previously. Back then, her divorced mother…
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on New Translations of Writings by Eduardo Galeano, Adonis, and Ryszard Krynicki
Hunter of Stories by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried (Nation Books/Hachette) Concerto al-Quds by Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa (Yale University Press) Magnetic Point: Selected Poems 1968-2014, by Ryszard Krynicki, translated by Clare Cavanagh (New Directions) * * * * * “There are some…
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on The Iliac Crest, a novel by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker
The ilium is one of the most prominent structural parts of the human body. Its crest forms the broad upper edge of the pelvis. Every med school rookie knows its name and function. Strangely, the unnamed narrator of The Iliac Crest, an experienced physician at the Serenity Shores Sanatorium, is unable to recall the name…
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Eight Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles
Welcome back to “Poets Recommend,” The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature, posted here in April and November. This season, eight poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles. Scroll down to read. The commentary includes: Dean Rader on Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora (Copper Canyon Press) Daisy Fried on Inheriting The War: Poetry and…
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on James Wright: A Life in Poetry by Jonathan Blunk
Just after the 1959 publication of his second collection of poems, Saint Judas, James Wright said, “What I would like is a poetry in our own language that is not so weighed down by guilt toward the past, which is able to contain images of what is real to us and belongs to us, and…
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on The Safe House, a novel by Christophe Boltanski, translated by Laura Marris
In Paris, the term hôtel particulier describes a grand residence with an interior courtyard, often owned by nobility from the countryside who would stay there while visiting the city. Many of these “townhouses” were constructed in the 1600’s. In 1935, Christophe Boltanski’s grandfather, Étienne, moved his wife, his firstborn son, and his mother to rented rooms…
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on Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America by Will Norman
In The Impossible Exile, his biography of Stefan Zweig’s final decade, George Prochnik asks, “What makes a good exile? Is there a calculable equation of inner fortitude, openness of mind, and external networks that determines a refugee’s odds of survival? Why did Thomas Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, and Zweig’s friend the conductor Bruno Walter flourish in…
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on Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture by Andrew Epstein
“I am less interested in talking about the aesthetics of the ordinary than participating in the fight for the ordinary,” proclaims Charles Bernstein in The Attack of the Difficult Poems. Are there any poets today who would not profess a loyalty to the ordinary? Yet as Andrew Epstein deftly explains in Attention Equals Life, the…
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on Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History, by Camille T. Dungy
“I can count seven women writers who told me that having a family cost them at least one book,” writes the poet Camille Dungy, “because of the ways they had to reorganize their lives to accommodate having children.” Dungy was clearly determined not to be the eighth. The lucid essays in Guidebook to Relative Strangers…
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on Primer, poems by Aaron Smith
I first encountered Yeats’ essay “A General Introduction for My Work” while working towards my writing degree. The essay appeared in 1937 just two years before Yeats died. As a young person hoping to be called a poet, I wanted to express my various distresses. But Yeats interrupted, provoking me to pause and consider: “Neither…
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on The Tongue of Adam by Abdelfattah Kilito, translated by Robyn Creswell
In her foreword to The Tongue of Adam, Marina Warner notes that Abdelfattah Kilito has long been known for “his strong love of the literature of astonishment (aj’aib) and his own taste for what is called gharaba, strangeness.” Born in Rabat in 1945, Kilito was educated in the language of his colonizers and taught to…
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on Paris Portraits: 1925-1930 by Berenice Abbott, ed. by Ron Kurtz & Han O’Neal
In 1918 at age 20, Berenice Abbott borrowed twenty dollars for a train ticket from Springfield, Ohio to Manhattan. She enrolled at the Columbia School of Journalism and dropped out after one week. Sculpture, she decided, would be her métier. “I was scared of New York, scared of America,” she wrote later. “I wasn’t commercial.…
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on Vinyl Freak: Love Letters To A Dying Medium by John Corbett
If you grew up in the age of vinyl, you can probably name the first 45’s and LP’s you owned. The relationship with the music was physical: handling the disks, peering at the cover art, re-reading the notes, and attending to the turntable. “At five I was listening to a Peter Rabbit record that had…