Books
POETRY
Making Panic
By Jeremy Benson
Angela Veronica Wong’s first full-length poetry collection, how to survive a hotel fire, exists within the rush and vacuum following an alarm: those split-seconds, or split-months, as the case may be, of confusion and action and error and clarity, in which memory is rewound, replayed, and questioned.
FICTION
Going Off the Deep End
By Bernard Lumpkin
Zoe Fishman’s novel Saving Ruth is a recent example of what publishers have called “New Adult” fiction: stories treating that sticky time of life between college and adulthood when full-fledged independence is still scary and not necessarily better than the familiar comforts of home.
BENJAMIN TAYLOR In Conversation with Adam Fitzgerald
Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of sitting down at an Italian restaurant in the West Village and asking Benjamin Taylor—author of two novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even, and recent editor of Saul Bellow: Letters—about his new book, Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a genre-bending travelogue that is part memoir, part history, part distillation of how ancient myths continue to shape our inner lives.
In Conversation
PETER M. WHEELWRIGHT with Scott Cheshire
Peter Wheelwright is now officially a Renaissance man, a real triple threat. This is not to say he’s a song-and-dance man. Then again it seems there is nothing the man cannot do.
In Conversation
JOHNNY TEMPLE with Justin Courter
In 1996, with money from his band’s record deal with a major label, Johnny Temple founded Akashic Books and published The Fuck Up, a novel by Arthur Nersesian. It’s been almost a decade since then, but don’t think for a second Akashic has mellowed into a more genteel version of its gutsy original incarnation—or forgotten the F-word.
In Conversation
CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER with Mandy Keifetz
Craig Morgan Teicher and I are of a tribe. We live a block and a half apart, take our coffee and cake at the same local grocery. Our kids play in the same South Brooklyn playground and we take many of our meals and beers at the same slightly-less-divey-than-it-used-to-be bar.
FICTION
A Double Life
By Paul Charles Griffin
Let us now praise Paula Bomer. Nine Months, her debut novel and follow-up to her celebrated story collection Baby, is a masterful portrait of the brilliant and frustrated artist/mother figure living in contemporary Park Slope, Brooklyn.
ART
Deep in the Heart of Art
By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Danger plus beauty equals glory. Recognize. And these murals, created illegally in the bowels of the New York City transit system, are thrilling. Painted in an abandoned subway station four stories down, they epitomize the potency of the “underground.”
FICTION
Alices Through the Looking Glass
By Jesse Tangen-Mills
If summer blockbusters are any sign, we’re as far from female protagonism as we were before the publication of the Second Sex. Heroes in our minds continue to be young and male.
CRITICISM
Dyer About Tarkovsky About Desire
By Mary Hanlon
Imagine a domain absent of cliché, gratuitous explosions, and Russell Brand, and enter Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. Zona is a meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, and similar to the Zone in Stalker, is a sanctuary untouched by genre and traditional narrative.
POETRY
Ethos, Ethics
By Matt Reeck
Stephen Motika’s Western Practice is a vast poetic anthropology, or archeology. It is a “kulture vulture,” trying to “tell us the culture” through its “description of collections” and “directories.”
