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The Elephanta Suite, a novel by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)
In “The Gateway of India,” the middle section of Paul Theroux’s new novel, Dwight Huntsinger is dispatched to Mumbai to close outsourcing deals for his company in Boston. When he returns, he is celebrated as a hero. “He had been welcomed home as though he had been in the jungle, returned from the ends of…
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A Tranquil Star, stories by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
With his two memoirs of Auschwitz, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Primo Levi (1919-1987) earned his reputation as the greatest writer of the Holocaust. In his preface to the former, he said that the urge to tell his remarkable story had taken on “the character of an immediate and violent impulse.” The Drowned and…
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Ooga-Booga, poems by Frederick Seidel (FSG)
Seidel's been around for a long time. He was a founding editor of The Paris Review and conducted its 1961 interview with Robert Lowell ("The Art of Poetry, No. 3"). His first book was published in 1963. Later came Final Solutions: Poems, 1959 - 1979; then Sunrise (1980), which who the National Book Critics Circle…
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Falling Man, a novel by Don DeLillo (Scribner)
In the June 28 issue of New York Review of Books, Andrew O'Hagan criticized "DeLillo's failure in Falling Man to imagine September 11." He also lectured that "good prose in a novel depends on its ability to exhale a secret knowledge, to have the exact weight of magic in relation to the material, the true…
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Edge and Fold, poems by Paul Hoover (Apogee Press)
There are poets who believe that language persists where everything else fades and disappears, and that within language lives a moral imperative. The poet writes consciously to create specific effects. And then, there are poets who believe that language creates the poet and reader in the moment he/she utters/reads, but that language doesn't persist and…
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Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, poems by Eleanor Lerman (Sarabande)
Lerman's last book, The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande), was one of the best books of poetry of 2001. She has followed up with Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, evermore rueful, perturbed, and unexpectedly pleased in tone. Her voice always sounds as if she has someone particular in mind to address, as if she is, from the…
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I Served the King of England, a novel by Bohumil Hrabal (New Directions)
New Directions has just reissued Hrabal's great novel, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, in advance of the release of Jiri Menzel's movie based on the book. Hrabal (1914-1997) is best known for writing Closely Watching Trains. But I Served the King of England is, quite simply, a masterpiece of tragicomic fiction. Hrabal loves…
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Space Walk, poems by Tom Sleigh (Houghton Mifflin)
Tom Sleigh's sixth book, Space Walk, crackles with intelligence and strangeness -- a voice so distracted by what it sees and contemplates that it speaks with both the directness of the keen observer and the oddness of someone just regaining his own balance from the sight of things. The first lines of "Premonition": "Oh yes,…
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on Robin Becker’s Domain of Perfect Affection
Robin Becker. Domain of Perfect Affection. University of Pittsburgh Press. In her 1947 essay “The Heart and the Lyre,” Louise Bogan urged “women poets” not to neglect passion in their poetry. “Even the greatly gifted Elizabeth Bishop,” she wrote, “places emphasis more upon anecdote than upon ardor.” The advice is still fresh. Robert Pinsky has…