The two books reviewed here represent the launch of the reborn Black Sparrow Press under the auspices of David R. Godine, Publisher. Very exciting. Let’s give them a big warm Boston welcome!
Books
Book Review: Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl — Connecting Readers to the World in a New Way
Good essays about art help us learn to see. Wonderful essays about the artists in our lives — which means all the artists through history, because, as Peter Schjeldahl so eloquently puts it, “all art is contemporary” —- help us learn how to live.
Book Review: “Marking Time” — Documenting the Visual Arts in American Prisons
Marking Time explores how the creation of art in prison can disrupt institutionalized patterns of dehumanization. The book’s larger narrative comes with an overt political aim: “to envision and help create a world without human caging.”
Book Review: “Cleanness” — Eroticism as a State of Being
The embrace of existential uncertainty in Cleanness enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator.
Poetry Review: “The Mother House” — Poems with the Demeanor of Nuns
In these poems, contemplation, serenity, and service are the order of the day.
Book Review: “Vanishing Monuments” — An Unforgettable Memory Palace
Vanishing Monuments is painstaking, in the literal sense of that compound word: it took enormous pain to make this book. It’s a novel that, for all its organizational strategies, reads with the immediacy of a memoir.
Literary Remembrance: Homage to Guy Davenport — Brilliance Worth Savoring
The fifteenth anniversary of the death of a grievously neglected writer whom critics almost universally acclaim a creative genius.
Book Review: “The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana” — A Caribbean Hamlet
Told from the perspective of the Global South, this novel enthralls as it explores the urgent economic and cultural contradictions of post-colonialism, globalization, class, and alienation.
Children’s Book Feature: Worried about Home Schooling? Relax — and Read
Even though options for parents abound, the very best option remains the simplest — pick up a book, snuggle up, and read.
Book Review: “Telephone” — Sounding Alternatives
The “choose your own adventure” turns out not to be a gimmick; setting up alternatives makes Telephone more affecting than Everett’s self-consciously directionless narrative may deserve.