• review • July 24, 2009

    Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak, with photographs by Ian Teh and Mark Nowak

    Maurice Manning

    To call Mark Nowak’s haunting new book a collection of poetry would be a bit of a misnomer. It would also be misleading to say Nowak is its author. The poems in Coal Mountain Elementary comprise three strands of found text; Nowak has selected and braided them, achieving an arresting effect. This is a book that exposes the darkest reaches of the global coal industry by using the industry’s own means—politely referred to as “extraction”—to lay bare the official language used to obfuscate mining’s human and environmental impact and to recover the far truer language of miners themselves.

    Nowak’s

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  • review • July 23, 2009

    The Complete Ripley Novels by Patricia Highsmith

    Michael Dirda

    “The essential American soul,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated description, “is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Of course, he was talking about Natty Bumppo and similar rough-and-tumble frontier spirits. By contrast, the amoral Tom Ripley—novelist Patricia Highsmith's most famous character—is easygoing, devoted to his wife and friends, epicurean, and a killer only by necessity. By my count, necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets in motion the successful suicides of three friends he

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  • review • July 22, 2009

    Far Arden by Kevin Cannon

    Karin L. Kross

    Trying to sum up Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden in brief is a challenge on the order of the one that the characters face in their epic attempt to locate the titular fabled island. Cannon’s graphic novel is an adventure, a comedy, a mystery, and a tragedy. It’s the story of a crusty sea-dog named Army Shanks, an orphan named Alistair, two college students, and the femme fatale Shanks once loved. There are fox pelts, a polar bear, a ship named the Areopagitica, a circus, fears of global warming, a college on the Boothia peninsula, and a deadly MRI machine. There’s a politician, plainclothes Royal

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  • review • July 21, 2009

    C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems and C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

    Maria Margaronis

    The poet Constantine Cavafy was a cosmopolitan by both birth and inclination. His parents were Constantinople Greeks of what was then known as “good family”; by the time their youngest son was born in 1863, they were settled in Alexandria, Egypt, prosperous pillars of a thriving community. But after his father's death in 1870, the family fortunes failed and Cavafy's mother took her sons to live for a few years near her late husband's relatives in Liverpool and London. (It's said that afterward Cavafy's Greek retained a faint English inflection.) The dimly remembered life of parties and servants

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  • review • July 20, 2009

    You Are Here by Donald Breckenridge

    Quinn Latimer

    Writing fiction about September 11 is an activity rife with hazards. According to a character in Donald Breckenridge’s You Are Here, a story about that day “could be read as sensational because the event was.” Though this observation may sound proactively defensive, it is the entirely sincere quandary at the center of this novel, which takes as its subject not only the seismic event of 9/11 but the very act of writing about it. At once a play, a short story, and a novel “loosely based on the production of a performance that never happened” (this claimed by a character named Donald Breckenridge),

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  • review • July 17, 2009

    Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 by Jackson Lears

    John Summers

    Rebirth of a Nation is ambitious in conception, sharp in tone, stylish in composition, erudite in argument, and unified by the force of conviction. It continues the project that Jackson Lears has been pursuing since his first book, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), then in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003). These books purport to uncover the origins of our times, or, as the subtitle of the new volume puts it, “the making of modern America.” Rebirth

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  • review • July 16, 2009

    The Essays of Leonard Michaels

    John Davidson

    After the publication of his first collection of stories, Going Places, in 1969, Leonard Michaels was hailed as a brilliant new star in American letters. But for the remainder of his career he felt slighted by the sly whispers — and sometimes, the loud broadsheet cries — of East Coast literary cognoscenti, some of whom he suspected of applying personal antipathy, and many of whom marked him as a writer who had failed to rise to his potential.

    Since Michaels’ death in 2003 (at age seventy, from complications of lymphoma), his reputation has undergone rehabilitation.

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  • review • July 15, 2009

    Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell

    Karin L. Kross

    Fans of filmmaker Michel Gondry may already be familiar with some of Gabrielle Bell’s work without knowing it. “Cecil and Jordan in New York,” the title story of Bell’s new collection, was recently adapted by Gondry into the short film Interior Design, one-third of the tripartite Tokyo! This deceptively simple fable contains the best aspects of Bell’s work: a sharp eye for human foibles, especially in relationships, and a dry, melancholic sense of humor. Jordan is an aspiring filmmaker, and his girlfriend Cecil accompanies him to New York, where her isolation and loneliness grow until she

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  • review • July 14, 2009

    Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler

    Alistair Brown

    I was sent Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel Wit’s End (published in Great Britain under the title The Case of the Imaginary Detective) by someone from Penguin, who had noticed from my own website that I was interested in postmodern literature. She promised that this novel was about author ownership, and whether a character belongs to readers or authors — ontological questions which seem prominent in postmodern literary fiction. But the novel has left me wondering whether, in fifty years time looking back to the present, literary critics will remark that postmodernism ended when nobody noticed it

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  • review • July 13, 2009

    In Hanuman’s Hands by Cheeni Rao

    Margaret Guroff

    Cheeni Rao’s head was full of chatter. Though outwardly a good Indian-American son (a stellar student-athlete from a Chicago suburb), the lanky teen was plagued by violent impulses that caused him to pick fights, break into houses, and even torch a building. One of the few things that could quiet his destructive inner voice was drug use, as he discovered early in his college career. But that method invited mayhem of its own. Rao’s rapid descent into addiction, drug dealing, robbery, and vagrancy is the subject of his memoir, In Hanuman’s Hands.

    “Our family curse is a forgotten secret,” writes

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  • review • July 10, 2009

    A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

    Karen Karbo

    Rafael Yglesias’s beautiful and disturbing ninth novel concerns the largely companionable twenty-seven-year marriage of Enrique and Margaret Sabas, or more accurately, the first several weeks of their courtship and the last several weeks of Margaret’s life, with a dash of adultery and the death of a parent tossed in to represent the middle bits. The novel is heavily autobiographical—Enrique, like Yglesias, is a literary prodigy, having quit school at sixteen after the publication of his first novel. The story opens five years later, and Enrique, now twenty-one, is living the despondent life of

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  • review • July 09, 2009

    Night Navigation by Ginnah Howard

    Sarah Fay

    Ginnah Howard’s first novel opens on a cold March night in upstate New York with a woman and her 37-year-old son en route to a detox facility. Del is an anxious person who would prefer not to drive, a “worry-bird,” as her son, Mark, says, “120 pounds of nervous coming at you.” In her rush to get to the hospital on time, she misses the exit to the Thruway and ends up on icy Route 5. When Mark takes over the driving, Del suddenly feels the car slide off the road, “but no impact, no impact,” and “for a few seconds they sit and are grateful.” This is the only moment Del and Mark will be at rest.

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