Allow me to submit, as my review, a revision of the LC Subject Headings originally listed for Gretchen Henderson’s The House Enters the Street. (The genre distinction brouhaha has nothing on the non-existent battle over the Library of Congress’ list of relevant subject categories a book supposedly addresses. The “free floating divisions” end up distilling…

Adam Prince‘s The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is a complicated collection of short stories. I know I’m supposed to admire a challenge, to dig deep for my empathy when confronting a fictional perpetrator of paedophilia up close and personal, especially if the perp is at all confused or remorseful—or escaping confusion and remorse by…

There is a Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) revival going on in the English-speaking world, and it’s always exciting when an author of relative obscurity suddenly inspires general discussion and becomes available to a larger audience. The notion of “relative obscurity” isn’t quite correct with respect to Lispector, however, except perhaps in the wider, English-speaking world. Lispector,…

Short fiction comes in a breathtaking variety of form and feeling, and each class of short fiction has its own set of strengths and particularities. A particular strength of long-form realistic short fiction is how it can subtly mimic the novel, allowing a twenty-page story to leave the same impression in the memory of the…

In his preface to The White Goddess: An Encounter, before descending into layers of memory, Simon Gough warns that he will not be bound by “precise dates and times,” and that “the narrative itself is far more important than whether or not an event or conversation happened on such-and-such a day.” Such a caveat created…

Prague. Cold rain on black leather jackets. City bridges looming over an icy river. Hard alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, prostitutes, men who look like corpses, men who look at corpses. Decay both physical and psychological. Violence. Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight is an unsettling read, even when held conceptually at a distance with the somehow-softening title…

Bayard Godsave’s Lesser Apocalypses traces the half-lives of disaster—dissipating but never disappearing. This kaleidoscopic collection challenges the idea of catastrophe as an isolated incident, a dot on a timeline. Rather, disaster lays low in the crannies of people’s porous lives, resurfacing every time the sponge is squeezed. Drawing on an older definition of apocalypse, these…

Near the end of the first story in Rebekah Matthews’s short story collection, Hymnal for Dirty Girls, the first person narrator, who is sitting in a car on a fairly bizarre stake-out with a woman she is clearly in love with, has the following thought: …I wonder what your husband is like. I wonder what he…

I’ll admit, the way for an author to get me to put down a book is to tell me how to read it. I’ve even committed the sacrilege of being pissed off at Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette,” target-“blank” with its frontispiece stating that idiot readers have been reading the book wrong and directions…

Controversial ambiguity. Two words that best describe Bruno Jasieński’s novel, I Burn Paris, recently published by Twisted Spoon Press. Although the story was originally serialized in French journal L’Humanité in 1929, Anglophone readers have had to wait for Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski’s 2012 translation to gain access to Jasieński’s particular blend of Polish…

David Giannini opens Rim, his multifarious prose poem, with a quotation by Spanish philosopher Jorgé Ortega y Gasset. It reads: So many things fail to interest us because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of places in our…

Novels of work, particularly those that take on modern laboring in all its absurdity and confusion, are a favorite subgenre of mine. From Magnus Mills’s fence builders and bus drivers caught in bureaucratic nightmares to the bizarre and often brutal administrative interactions of Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life or Stacey Levine’s Dra—, it’s a fictional category…