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on Crime, stories by Ferdinand von Schirach, translated by Carol Brown Janeway
Born in Munich in 1964, Ferdinand von Schirach makes his living as a defense attorney in Berlin. At age 31, von Schirach became a controversial celebrity when he defended Günter Schabowski, a former senior East German official held responsible for the deaths of refugees along the Wall. Schabowski was given a three-year custodial sentence. In…
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on New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected William Matthews, ed. by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly (Red Hen Press)
Commenting on William Matthews’ Search Party: Collected Poems (2004), David Wojahn suggests that Matthews’ reputation may be more vulnerable than those of his contemporaries because his “mature style remains blissfully indifferent to most of the prevailing literary fashions.” But the other generational poets Wojahn names – Hass, Plumly, Bidart, Olds, Glück, Williams, Pinsky -- have…
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on Cheese, Pears and History in a Proverb, by Massimo Montanari, translated from the Italian by Beth Archer Brombert
Al contadino non far sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere. “Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears.” A version of this Italian aphorism has existed since the 13th century. Despite its longevity, the proverb puzzled Massimo Montanari, a professor of medieval history and the history of food…
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on Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge
“Teaching is a way to lose interest in what you thought you were interested in,” said Philip Guston in a 1966 interview with Karl Fortess for a Smithsonian oral history project. “The more I tried to impart what I knew to the students at Iowa that excited me, it was as if the energy or…
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on Greensward, text by Cole Swensen, graphic design by Shari DeGraw
Dr. Gisela Kaplan, an expert in animal behavior and neuroscience, may claim there is no evidence “that animals have an aesthetic sense,” but Cole Swensen, an expert in poetry, is determined to have us imagine things otherwise. She states on page one: “That whatever aesthetics is, it can only be transmitted to other species –…
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on Visitation, a novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
More than seven miles long and a mile wide, the Scharmützelsee -- also known as “Märkisches Meer” -- is the biggest lake in the German state of Brandenburg, located about 35 miles southwest of Berlin. A lakeside property there is the evanescent focal point of Jenny Erpenbeck’s resonant third novel, Visitation. The arrivals and desperate…
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on He and I, poems by Emmanuel Moses, and Treason, poems by Hédi Kaddour, both translated by Marilyn Hacker
In her essay “Poetry and Public Mourning,” Marilyn Hacker writes, “The Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun wrote that, if the response to atrocity is 'Never Again,’ something in the human world may change; if it is ‘Never Again To Us,’ the ‘we’ in question and whomever ‘we’ encounter will be doomed to risk, to suffer, and…
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on A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers by Will Friedwald
Earlier this year, Will Friedwald donated his vast collection of 14,000 jazz and popular music albums – perhaps the largest such collection in New York City -- to two major music archives. The shelves of his floor-to-ceiling apartment in East Harlem may now be empty, but Friedwald has packed his sprawling knowledge and reasoned judgments…
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Nineteen Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles
For holiday-time reading and gift-giving, here are 21 poetry collections recommended by 19 poets – Hank Lazer, Ange Mlinko, Tony Hoagland, Tara Betts, Lisa Russ Spaar, Philip Metres, Ken Chen, Julie Sheehan, Rusty Morrison, Joel Brouwer, Todd Boss, Robert Cording, Elaine Sexton, Leslie Harrison, Deborah Woodard, Aaron Belz, Don Bogen, Amanda Auchter, and Aaron Baker.…
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on The Iron Key and The Art of the Poetic Line, poems and essays by James Longenbach
Writing about poets in his essay “Purity, Restraint, Stillness” (VQR, 2006), James Longenbach observes, “More than lack of ambition, it is the inability to surrender to our characteristic callings and rhythms that keeps us from fulfilling our promise … The surrender of the will is itself impossible merely to will, and we may struggle with…
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on Jack London, Photographer, by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Sara S. Hodson and Philip Adam
Jack London’s fame was assured when he sold The Call of the Wild to Macmillan in 1903 for today’s equivalent of $15,000. Yet that year also saw the publication of The People of the Abyss, London’s extraordinary photojournalistic narrative of poverty in London’s East End. Impersonating a runaway American sailor, London rented a small room,…
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on Air, edited by John Knechtel
A sampling of this week’s news about air: Over the past seven days, 1.3 trillion digital messages passed through the air, including from new Mac Air Notebooks. Scented consumer products (even some labeled as “green”) are shown to emit toxic chemicals not listed on labels. In Calcutta, scientists discover that the membrane linings of eggshells…
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on Frank: The Voice, a biography by James Kaplan
I was Milan on business on May 14, 1998, the day Frank Sinatra died at age 82. The story topped the Italian national news broadcast during which President Clinton, visiting Germany, responded to a reporter’s question about Sinatra and America. Only then did Clinton go on to discuss new U.S. sanctions against India, which had…
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on The More I Owe You, a novel by Michael Sledge
Michael Sledge drew on a rich cache of material for The More I Owe You, a novel based on the turbulent 17-year relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. There are Bishop’s letters collected in One Art, the oral biography Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, Carmen Oliveira’s Rare and Commonplace Flowers on Bishop and Soares,…
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Three Recent Poetry Titles by Joan Swift, Nguyen Trai, and John Taylor
Snow on a Crocus, a chapbook of poems by Joan Swift (Swan Scythe Press) Joan Swift may be best known for her poems about rape, the first of which appeared in the 1970s and were republished in Intricate Moves (1997). But Swift is not the sort of writer who asks the reader to gaze through…