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on Roof Life by Svetlana Alpers
Svetlana Alpers retired from teaching at Berkeley in 1999 as one of the most influential art historians of the previous three decades. A sentence in her new book, Roof Life, sums up a lifetime of viewing and writing about art: “The problem is not matching words to pictures, but rather how to keep the interest…
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on The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor, by Alberto Manguel
In his forty-fourth book as writer or editor, Alberto Manguel once again makes spirited claims for the interaction between reader and book – the “book fool” and the world-as-words. Here, the world is like a book open to interpretation and one’s life is like a voyage through that book. Reading is a kind of enlightened…
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on My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing In The Rain, a novel by Patricio Pron, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Patricio Pron describes his fifth novel, My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, as “non-fiction fiction.” It is narrated by a young Argentine writer who, having lived in Germany for eight years, received a call in 2008 from his family. His ailing father’s admittance to a hospital led to the son’s return home. Now…
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on Exit, Civilian, poems by Idra Novey
Recently, U.S. attorney-general Eric Holder declared there is an “unnecessarily large prison population” in America. He added, “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” More than half of the country’s 6,000,000 prisoners are in jail for drug convictions, with 80% of those…
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on What Darkness Was, a novel by Inka Parei, translated by Katy Derbyshire
Born in Frankfurt in 1967, Inka Parei was ten years old during what became known as the “German Autumn,” a series of killings, bombings and robberies by the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other left-wing protest groups. The assassination of the attorney general of Germany was followed by the kidnappings and murders of the head of Dresdner…
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on Eléctrico W, a novel by Hervé Le Tellier
Hervé Le Tellier is a made member of the OuLiPo, that group of 21 writers, mostly French, whose efforts Daniel Levin Becker describes as “attempts to prove the hypothesis that the most arbitrary structural mandates can be the most creatively liberating.” But Eléctrico W, the fourth of his books to be translated into English, isn’t…
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on The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime by Adrian Raine
On June 25, Judge Carlos Samour agreed to give a Colorado state mental hospital more time to complete its examination of James Holmes, the 26-year old charged with killing 12 people and injuring 70 others in an Aurora theater last July. “I don’t think I have a whole lot of choice,” said the judge of…
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on Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, by Olivier Meslay, Scott Barker, David M. Lubin, Alexander Nemerov and Nicola Langford
At 11:00 pm on November 21, 1963, Air Force One landed at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. A motorcade took President and Mrs. John Kennedy to the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. Having only narrowly won the state’s electoral votes in 1960, Kennedy intended his visit to unite and motivate local Democrats…
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on Memoirs: Prospero’s Son by Seth Lerer and The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
Seth Lerer’s parents met after being cast for a Brooklyn College production of Blithe Spirit in 1948. He was born in Brooklyn in 1955 and the family lived there until the mid-1960s when his father, Larry Lerer, then a junior high school history teacher seeking advancement, was admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education at…
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“What Will You Read This Summer?” 30 Writers Name Some Titles
In this feature, thirty poets, novelists, editors, bloggers and reviewers share their summer reading lists. Many thanks to Gail Mazur, Fady Joudah, Karen Brown, Brian Teare, Ange Mlinko, Peter Grandbois, Daniel Lawless, Stona Fitch, Elaine Equi, Erika Dreifus, David Rivard, Marion Winik, Geoffrey Becker, Emilia Phillips and Daniel Lawless, Jane Ciabattari, Annie Finch, Patrick Kurp,…
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on Wreck Me, poems by Sally Ball
Sally Ball’s second book of poems begins with modesty as its mien. Addressing a nuthatch, the speaker poses “no threat” because she loves “to make no difference here.” She goes on: “My throat like yours -- / rapid little tremor, / heart-freight, air.” As slight presences show up here and there, Ball’s tone signals a…
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on The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, a novel by Carlos Rojas
For a good laugh and a sigh, Carlos Rojas likes to repeat a piece of advice he got from Jose Manuel Lara (1914-2003), the founder of Planeta, Spain’s biggest media empire. “Carlos, you and the likes of you are a bunch of pedantic dudes, who know just about four things,” said Lara. “Therefore you believe…
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Seventeen Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Welcome to the Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, seventeen 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: Joel Brouwer on Lake Superior by Lorine Niedecker (Wave Books) Brian Teare on The Weeds by Jared Stanley (Salt Publishing)…
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on All That Is, a novel by James Salter
It is said, as if it were obvious, that James Salter has structured his eight books of prose fiction around spikes of erotic arousal. The adrenals pump to the waft of pheromones and the rest is anticipation – unless the reader, attending to Salter’s tone and rhythms, inverts things and senses that the stories are…