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By Eric Markowsky, on May 14th, 2013  Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
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The good people at Archipelago Books are out with a new Antonio Tabucchi title in English this spring, and while I can’t gush about it the way I did about The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, I think you might still find The Woman of Porto Pim worth your while.
The title short story is a classic, old-fashioned tale of love, betrayal, and murder set in a small whaling village. The voice of the narrator, an aged tavern singer, is full of longing and mystery. It’s one of the finest short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time.
The book, on the other hand, is something more curious. It’s a tourist’s love letter to the Azores, a set of remote Atlantic islands considered an autonomous region of Portugal. Fueled by a hybrid of research, personal experience, and imagination, The Woman of Porto Pim offers a brief overview on the whaling regulations governing the islands, a first-person account of a whale hunt, and a few observations on human beings from the point of view of the hunted whales. …
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By Paul-Newell Reaves, on May 13th, 2013 Author: Jane Shore
2012, Houghton-Mifflin
Filed Under: Poetry
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Jane Shore is a poet of memory, sometimes sharp, sometimes sweet. She is a poet of moments with family and friends, also sharp and sweet. Spanning childhood above a New Jersey dress shop, fleets of Jewish mothers and aunts, mourning her own mother, and raising her own daughter: her poems are usually both in simultaneity, and always to her soft and playful music. Not near the end of her already long career, her new book collects her best and brings with them some fresh quirks she has remembered. So That Said repeats what she has already said, but says also, this style has already been said by me. She is moving on. High stakes she has at least one more statement to make―if not in mind―a the Tempest of her own, her own Geography III, perhaps two or three of them.
That Said starts with the new, then works through her five previous volumes, in order. Most major poets are best known by their selected or collected works―a mistake, I feel, as most including Shore’s leave out cover artworks and internal subdivisions, not to mention the all-too-revealing worse poems, poems the authors consider irrelevant. This distinction, between still relevant and not, validates a selected poems collection beyond publicity, beyond best-of. Which poems did these authors at one time considered worthy of publication, but years later not? I have a suspicion that most worse poems are originally included only because the authors so badly want them there, work of so many months or years making them less worse. Shore’s books are slim, so she need not leave many out, but some she does. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on May 6th, 2013 Author: Alicia Suskin Ostriker
2013, University of Pittsburgh Press
Filed Under: Poetry
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To be a Jew means different things to different people, perhaps especially to different Jews. Is it the religion? The history? The ethnicity? If the religion, what about it? The belief system? The holiday calendar? In her Preface to The Book of Life, Alicia Ostriker asks these questions a little differently: “What is it to be a Jewish poet? What is it to be a Jewish woman poet?” Jewishness, she tells us, “has grown on me like a taste for herring, like a needle in a sweatshop relentlessly stitching,” evoking Jewish cultural images. Which is to say that it’s been a process of discovery for her, and continues to be. These poems, culled from a third of a century of writing, track that process. Her parents and grandparents were Marxists, for whom religion was opium. The essence of Judaism for them was social activism. We see those concerns in Ostriker’s verse but we also find a mystical, visionary, even prophetic thread as well.
The Book of Life is divided into six parts, which roughly cover the various aspects of her Jewishness, her Jewish anxieties and interests. The first part consists of more personal poems, growing up Jewish in America and specifically the lower east side of Manhattan, poems about parents, grandparents, grandchildren. An elegy for Allen Ginsberg. These poems are very “haimish” — homey, folksy, if not really nostalgic; they contain a certain angst. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 29th, 2013  Author: Karen Lord
2013, Ballantine Books
Filed under: Sci-fi
Find it at Goodreads
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I think my sci-fi kick is officially over. I started reading this book after seeing a gushing post about it at io9, a preeminent sci-fi website. The post was titled “If you want to see what science fiction is capable of in 2013, you ought to pick up this book.” There are other bold claims in the piece (like “it’s a quick, fun read”), but the title is heart of the matter. If this is all science fiction is capable of these days, I don’t want any part of it.
In The Best of All Possible Worlds, there are four races of humans in the galaxy: Terrans, Ntshune, Sadiri, and Zhinuvians. The Sadiri are long-lived telepaths who have explored the universe with their “mindships”—they’re basically halfway between Vulcans and Elves. In fact, one Sadiri clan actually calls themselves Elves. It’s almost stupefyingly derivative, and the world-building is by far the best part of the novel.
The Terrans are humans as we think of them, the Zhinuvians or performers are something, and the Ntshune are… I don’t even know. Partially that’s because the utterly dry and life-devoid prose put me to sleep every time I started to read this book, and partially it’s because it doesn’t matter what the Ntshune are, because they have nothing to do with anything.
The inciting incident of the novel (I actually hesitate to call it a novel, more on that shortly), is a horrible act of genocide, committed by the Ainya against the Sadiri. Specifically, the Ainya blew up Sadira altogether. Which seems to have been a stupid decision, because the Sadiri and their semi-allies the Zhinuvians are the only ones with ships that can reach the Ain. So the Ainya are stranded wherever that planet is, and they literally don’t factor into the novel again, ever. …
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By Robert Cooperman, on April 23rd, 2013 Author: Charles Harper Webb
2013, University of Pittsburgh Press
Filed Under: Poetry
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In What Things Are Made Of, Charles Harper Webb displays such a wonderfully quirky, idiosyncratic voice, whether writing about oil-slicked, doomed penguins or puppy love. His poems careen between wild hyperboles, the irony of looking back at youthful indiscretions and unrequited or disappointed love, to the joy he feels with his beloved small son and wife, and his love of old rock bands like the Stones or Led Zeppelin. But there’s always something interesting, fascinating in this collection, something that makes us read and keep turning the pages, to see what new and deliriously strange take he’ll have on the things of this world.
One of Webb’s favorite poetic ploys is to pile up instances and examples until they seem to be almost spinning out of control, taking on lives of their own. It’s an effective strategy to get at the confusion, chaos, miserableness, but also the sheer fecundity of life. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on April 19th, 2013  Author: Mary Roach
2013, Reader’s Digest
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Humor
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Mary Roach recently released a book that has received rave reviews, has been called both hilarious and informative, and has even earned her a guest spot on The Daily Show.
Mary Roach also has a new book called My Planet, which is a collection of columns she wrote for Reader’s Digest. Despite the promise on the flap copy that Roach will bring to these “essays” the same, “uncanny wit and amazingly analytical eye,” that makes her other books so popular, My Planet, falls far short of being informative, or funny, or even interesting.
Roach’s other books—her well received and well read books—are in-depth and thoroughly researched. Roach’s writing is accessible and witty. Roach’s curiosity is a catalyst for those books, and her subjects are worth being curious about. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 15th, 2013 Author: Hannu Rajaniemi
2012, Tor
Filed Under: Sci-Fi
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The best science fiction is the sort that goes out of its way to create an intricate, fully realized world that is both exciting to explore as a reader and comments on contemporary society at the same time. To those ends, Quantum Thief is one of the most successful pieces of sci-fi that I’ve ever encountered. The ideas in this book are dense–it’s certainly not a breezy read–but if you hang with it, the payoff is worth the effort.
It does take some hanging with, though. Many of the ideas and even some of the settings are fairly abstract, and it will take a little while fro the reader to get oriented and be able to understand exactly what is happening where. This is because the book is oozing with post-humanism concepts. It opens in a psychic prison of sorts, where a former thief named Jean le Flambeur is faced with the daily dilemma of either killing himself or being killed by a copy of himself. A roguish girl, Mieli, and her slutty spacecraft (bear with me) spring Jean from prison and take him to a city on Mars called the Oubliette, where they plan to pull off a major (and mysterious) heist.
This is where things really open up conceptually. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 12th, 2013  Author: Derek Raymond
2006, Serpent’s Tail (originally published 1984)
Filed under: Mystery
Find it at Goodreads
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I’ve had a tough time finding a book to follow up my last great read, as is usually the case. I’ve started about half a dozen, but none of them held my attention past fifty pages, until I came across this piece by A.L. Kennedy about the 1984 mystery novel He Died with His Eyes Open, the first in the “Factory” mystery series by the British crime writer Derek Raymond.
Kennedy says, “I’ve read He Died With His Eyes Open twice. I don’t know if I could stand to read it again. Like all of Derek Raymond’s work, it has a remarkable and disturbing physicality.” It’s true. Raymond’s world is a grossly imagined one full of lecherous pub governors, filthy apartments, and sadistically violent criminals, though not sociopaths… his characters have more complex psyches than simply amoral monsters.
For a modern mystery reader, this book might be unsatisfying. It’s relatively sparse on plot, following a lone, unnamed detective in the Unexplained Deaths unit at London’s Metropolitan Police. When a middle-aged drunk turns up messily beaten to death, the detective takes it a bit personally and sifts through the victim’s life to find out why. Luckily, the victim left a long series of journals on tapes (thus the cover), and much of the novel simply transcribes these tapes.
There’s a quote at the end of this reprint from Drive author James Sallis, who calls Raymond’s Factory series “literature truly written from the edge of human experience.” That should give you a decent idea of the kind of book we’ve got here. Raymond’s plot essentially sketches out a straight line, and though there’s a rather absurd reveal at the end, the oomph of the novel comes from the messy lives it depicts. …
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By Roman Gladstone, on April 2nd, 2013 Author: Bonnie ZoBell
2013, Monkey Puzzle Press Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
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Just as the term sounds, a “whack-job” is defined in the urban dictionary as: 1. A Person for whom failure is so consistent that they are slowly driven into madness. 2. Someone who partakes in unbelievably odd behavior that a reasonable human would avoid. 3. An extremely erratic or irrational person.
The ten stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s neat little collection are full of such characters, and as the term further suggests, the characters and the tales are darkly comic. Because these are flash pieces – brief narratives that are over before a reader has time to get too emotionally involved – they are not really “tragic” stories, but tragedy hovers over them, menacing as a thundercloud, ZoBell subtly teasing out the ghastly implications with the skill of a gifted storyteller. Often as not, though, there is a redemptive detail at the end and not just imminent doom. …
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By Aaron Block, on March 28th, 2013 Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Artists: Marcos Martín & Muntsa Vicente
2013, The Panel Syndicate
Filed Under: Graphic Novel
Find it at The Panel Syndicate
 The Private Eye #1
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Last Monday the comics rumor/journalism site Bleeding Cool linked to a few teaser images that were posted to Spanish-language comic blogs announcing a new series from Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martín, who previously collaborated on Doctor Strange: the Oath, a mini-series for Marvel in the mid 2000s. The images were intriguing, and the names involved suggested a good read – Vaughan is the fan-favorite writer of Saga and Y: the Last Man, among other other celebrated titles, and Martín is best known for his work on Daredevil, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Batgirl: Year One. I anticipated learning more about the book in the coming weeks or months, the plot points and art from first issue gradually teased out in interviews and previews, dulling the surprise but confirming that it’s worth the three or four or however many dollars. That’s how comics are marketed today.
Then it was Tuesday, and suddenly the book, titled The Private Eye #1, was available, for however much I wanted to pay, through The Panel Syndicate (a new digital publisher started by Vaughan, Martín, and friends). All the excitement about The Private Eye was generated by its mere existence, and by the distribution method. Digital-only comics are nothing new, and neither is the “tip-jar” payment model (Radiohead’s In Rainbows is probably the most famous example, but there are many more across all mediums) but the two in tandem, and employed by high-profile creators, is novel, as is the minimalist promotional “campaign.” Vaughan and Martín trusted their audience to generate their own hype, something mainstream comic readers haven’t had to do very often in the past decade or so. …
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