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on Off Course, a novel by Michelle Huneven
Narratives of unrequited love, that staple of story and song, sometimes end in tragedy but always entail hurt. Emma Bovary swallows arsenic. Before she dies, Flaubert takes the reader through the rise and fall of her two love affairs. But his true subject is not unrequited love and not even adultery. It is fascination. Recalling…
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on Titles by Peter Schneider, Deborah Woodard, and Steve Yarbrough
Berlin Now: The City After the Wall nonfiction by Peter Schneider (Farrar Straus & Giroux) Borrowed Tales, prose fiction by Deborah Woodard (Stockport Flats) The Realm of Last Chances, a novel by Steve Yarbrough (Knopf/Vintage) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *…
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on Ghost Image, essays by Hervé Guibert, translated by Robert Bononno
For his eighteenth birthday in 1973, Hervé Guibert received a Rollei 35 camera from his father. Eight years later in 1981, Guibert published L’image fantôme or Ghost Image, a collection of sixty-three short essays on photography that begins with a botched attempt to take a photograph of his mother shortly after receiving the gift. “The…
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on Wonderland, a novel by Stacey D’Erasmo
In her fourth novel, Wonderland, Stacey D’Erasmo has crafted an immersive narrative about artistic creativity and freedom by honoring a basic unknowingness about the subject. She succeeds through the tonal control of her candid and shrewd narrator: Anna Brundage, a 44-year old rock star revered by cultish fans but just now emerging from a seven-year…
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“What Will You Read This Summer?” Thirty Writers List Some Titles
In this feature, thirty writers share their summer reading lists. Scroll down/search to find lists by Mona Simpson, Pierre Joris, CM Burroughs, Gail Mazur, Cyrus Cassells, Michelle Huneven, Jamaal May, Laila Lalami, Floyd Skloot, Joan Silber, Daisy Fried, Jess Row, Lucy Corin, Gillian Conoley, Tarfia Faizullah, Sally Ball, Sarah Vap, Shane McCrae, Steve Yarbrough, Victoria…
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on Nietzsche Apostle and Philosophical Temperaments by Peter Sloterdijk
“Philosophers are athletes of conceptual categories,” writes Peter Sloterdijk. If so, Sloterdijk is a notable color commentator of the games. He portrays Wittgenstein as “a thinker who left behind a work of individual sentences,” a remark that illustrates Sloterdijk’s similar talent for compression, leaping thought and daring statement. For nearly four decades, Sloterdijk (b. 1947…
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on A Kind of Dream, stories by Kelly Cherry
One of Kelly Cherry’s most quoted and anthologized works is a poem called “Alzheimer’s,” published in her 1997 collection, Death and Transfiguration. It’s a snapshot of one moment in a man’s decline: A “crazy old man” arrives at a door holding a suitcase ... … swinging from his hand, That contains shaving cream, a piggy…
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on Harlequin’s Millions, a novel by Bohumil Hrabal
Shortly before he died in 1997, Bohumil Hrabal specified that his coffin should bear the inscription Pivovar Polná or Polná Brewery. While working there as an assistant bookkeeper, his mother Marie met his step-father Francin (Hrabal never knew his biological father). They married in 1917 when the boy was three years old. Fifty-one years later…
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on The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, by George Prochnik
Stefan Zweig began writing his autobiography, The World Of Yesterday, in 1934, the year he departed Vienna to escape the Anschluss and Nazi persecution of the Jews. After a brief stay in England and a longer period spent in Manhattan and Ossining, New York, Zweig and his second wife Lotte moved to Petrópolis in Brazil…
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on The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era, by Craig Nelson
Presented with yet another book about atomic energy, we might ask why. We already have Richard Rhodes's very thorough The Making of the Atomic Bomb, two magnificent biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer (American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and…
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Twelve Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles
Welcome to the Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, twelve poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent titles. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. The commentary includes: Brian Teare on Caribou by Charles Wright (Farrar Straus Giroux) Catherine Barnett on Headwaters by Ellen Bryant Voigt (Norton) Sally…
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on Various Small Books, edited by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zshiegner
In 1963 at age 25, Ed Rusha (pronounced Ru-SHAY) produced 400 handmade copies of a photobook titled Twentysix Gasoline Stations. The textless content consisted of 26 black-and-white snapshot-style photos of gas stations. He sold the books for a few dollars each, insisting they were created to be ephemeral and “end up in the trash.” Fifteen…
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on Rimbaud the Son by Pierre Michon, translated by Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays
“I suspect that the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him,” wrote Daniel Mendelsohn whose balanced take on the poet may possibly be attributed to his first encountering the poems in his forties. Edmund White begins his essential biography, Rimbaud:…
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on Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, essays by Floyd Skloot
Floyd Skloot has produced four books of essays over the past 11 years, each seemingly preoccupied with his illness and its effects on cognition, memory and motor response. A more market-minded writer would have written a commoditized illness memoir years ago and been done with it. But Skloot doesn’t write about illness as much as…