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on City Dog, essays by W. S. Di Piero
W. S. Di Piero has been writing essays on art and artists, poets and writers, and travel and culture for thirty-five years. City Dog, his fourth collection of essays, takes up these topics again, but it is shaped and arranged with heightened deliberation. Whether his subject is his childhood in South Philadelphia, the psyche of…
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on Glover’s Mistake, a novel by Nick Laird
There is much to resist in Nick Laird’s irresistible second novel Glover’s Mistake -- mainly the character of David Pinner, a bald, overweight, lonely, cynical, bile-blogging, porn-surfing, 35-year old college literature instructor. But before one comes to detest him, Laird’s narrator has tucked us so devilishly into Pinner’s psyche that one spends the rest of…
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on Where The Money Went, short stories by Kevin Canty
James Wood says that short story writers are addicted to Chekhov’s “‘negative endings’: the way his stories expire into ellipses, or seem to end in the middle of a thought ... This is so invisibly part of the grammar of contemporary short fiction that we no longer notice how peculiarly abrupt, how monotonously fragmentary much…
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on Between Fire and Sleep, essays by Jaroslaw Anders
Jaroslaw Anders emigrated to the United States from Poland in 1981 when he was thirty-one. Since 1984 he has been an editor, writer and producer for Voice of America. In the 80’s and 90’s he wrote a series of review essays for The New Republic, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and New York Review of…
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on Been and Gone, poems by Julian Kornhauser, translated by Piotr Florczyk
Born in Gliwice in 1946, Julian Kornhauser was a member of the Generation of 1968, the young Polish poets who came after Szymborska, Herbert and Różewicz. With Adam Zagajewski he co-edited “The Unrepresented World” (1974), a collection of essays which served as the group’s manifesto. He has published twelve books of poems, three novels, and…
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on Zero At The Bone, poems by Stacie Cassarino
The poems in Zero at the Bone, Stacie Cassarino’s highly accomplished first book, emit a sonic calm even -- or especially -- while teasing out the adversities in their subject matter. Her tone modulates between intimate remark and a flatness called out by the weight of the scene. Often her speaker observes herself in memory,…
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on On Kindness, essays by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
I read Louise Glück’s poem “Gratitude” for the first time 35 years ago and my initial reaction is still fresh: I’d been exposed. Gratitude Do not think I am not grateful for your small kindness to me. I like small kindnesses. In fact I actually prefer them to the more substantial kindness, that is…
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on K Blows Top by Peter Carlson
Historians often mention the Kennedy-Nixon debates or the JFK assassination to mark the emergence of mass media culture. But Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the U.S. in 1959 transfixed the world for fourteen days during the height of the Cold War. Daniel Schorr, who covered the visit for CBS News, calls it “the first of the…
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on Hovering at a Low Altitude, the collected poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld
Dahlia Ravikovitch once said that the value of a poet is worth less than that of a garlic peel. “A slice of bread with butter and honey on an oil cloth-covered breakfast table solves any problem better than an elusive poem,” she remarked in an interview. “What takes me out of the periods of depression…
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on The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, by Douglas Eklund
What constitutes a “movement” in the arts? As time passes, how is authority conferred on the accomplishments of a movement? “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum running through August 2, seems designed for pondering these questions, even as Douglas Eklund, a Met photography curator who assembled the show, is determined to…
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on Notes on Sontag, by Phillip Lopate
Upon the wave of reminiscences and assessments following Susan Sontag’s death on December 28, 2004, Carlin Romano wrote in The Chronicle Review, “Too many people who sized her up committed the unpardonable sin in her book: parroting familiar clichés rather than thinking, reading, and analyzing for themselves.” Phillip Lopate isn’t one of the sinners. Make…
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on King of a Hundred Horsemen, poems by Marie Étienne, translated by Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker’s translation of Marie Étienne’s eleventh book of poems, King of a Hundred Horsemen, represents the first ample introduction of the work of this restlessly inventive French literary figure to an English-reading audience. Born in 1938 in Menton, Étienne spent most of her childhood in Vietnam and Senegal. The works for which she is…
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on The American Painter Emma Dial, a novel by Samantha Peale
Emma Dial is a 31-year old painter who won’t paint. Or rather, as the assistant to Michael Freiberg, famous since the 70’s for his landscapes, Emma paints only for her boss in his Manhattan studio. He sketches or works from found imagery, she executes from his maquettes. Michael, who is married, and Emma have been…
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The Dangerous Shirt, poems by Alberto Ríos
Poets are usually identified by their materials rather than by what they discover within them. This annoying shorthand has its obvious uses and benefits. Alberto Ríos has been called “the best Latino poet writing in English today.” In many interviews, he has repeated and expanded on the facts of his background: Mexican father, English mother,…
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on Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness by Willard Spiegelman
Rush Limbaugh claims our right to “the pursuit of happiness” does not mean happiness is our right. He does not sound happy in his conviction, but apparently takes pleasure from repeating it. For Limbaugh, keeping what you earn is satisfying, shoring up one’s defenses in a harsh world. Muhammed Ali, demanding immediate access to the…