Home » NewPages Blog » Books » Page 22

NewPages Blog :: Books

Discover news from independent publishers and university presses including new titles, events, and more.

Book Review :: Rule of Composition by Steve Timm

Rule of Composition by Steve Timm book cover image

Guest Post by Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

The latest book from Steve Timm, Rule of Composition, more than resembles jazz. Giant-of-the-art Cecil Taylor’s album with the Feel Trio, 2 Ts for a lovely T, forms the basis for Timm’s book’s division into “listens,” when the author wrote as an improvisational accompaniment to the 10-CD set. While Timm is 21st Century Wisconsin’s answer to Russian zaum poetry and Dadaist soundscapes, he also diffuses a hyper-inflationary poetics into the nonce words others might dash throughout lyric pieces or isolate in austere minimal poems, spinning out syntactic, phonetic and morphemic swerves — each of which he entrusts to readers’ decipherment. Lines blatz across pages from “Marry pensile attribles / join the scuchus suqologue” to “that’s myander enjourn?” so that “a lipe shangs in the bilence / zeroes aglitter.” Once clought in Timm’s whipnotic enburgonment, the mive glences bursht ignoblistervly. To call his work word-salad by no means disparages it; rather, it suggests a need to elevate the art of the farrago in the culinary imagination. For anyone tired of literature that tells you what or how to think, the book can be purchased online and in-person through Woodland Pattern Book Center and A Room of One’s Own.

Rule of Composition by Steve Timm. Bananaquit Press, 2022.

Reviewer bio: Nicholas Michael Ravnikar makes understanding look like overthinking. He’s currently disabled with mental illnesses. Married with two kids, he enjoys cooking, exercise and meditation. Stay in touch via social media and download free books at bio.fm/nicholasmichaelravnikar.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Chronicles of a Luchador

Chronicles of a Luchador YA fiction by Ray Villareal book cover image

Chronicles of a Luchador
YA Fiction by Ray Villareal
Arte Público Press, June 2022

Jesse Baron, the son of the American Championship Wrestling star known as the Angel of Death, is about to graduate from high school. His parents expect him to attend the University of Texas and study mechanical engineering, something he’s not interested in. The young man knows he would be a natural at professional wrestling, and with his father’s help, he might even reach the same level of fame and success. But the Angel of Death, retired from the ACW and running a wrestling promotion and school, refuses to train his son for fear he will choose sports entertainment over a college degree. Jesse decides that once he gets settled at UT, he’s going to look for another place to wrestle. To keep his father from finding out, he’ll promote himself as a masked luchador from Oaxaca, Mexico, named Máscara de la Muerte. When no one will hire him, Jesse reluctantly considers joining a lucha libre organization, even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. Will the fans and his fellow wrestlers see him as a luchador—or just a gringo with a mask?

Book Review :: The Silk The Moths Ignore by Bronwen Tate

The Silk The Moths Ignore poems by Bronwen Tate published by Inlandia Books cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The Silk the Moths Ignore, Bronwen Tate’s debut and winner of Inlandia Institute’s 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, is to be “read as choreography,” marking “what led to this.” In her poems, Tate makes legible what is illegible about rejection as it concerns motherhood and miscarriage—rejection by a newborn of a mother’s breast and by a woman’s body of a fetus. What are the roles of nature and will? These poems “rage at who names a body,” acknowledge that a man and a woman “carry risk unevenly,” and ultimately recognize “the present carries multiples.” Memory and recovery, balance and counterbalance are important to these poems whose forms toggle between lullaby-like short lyrics and Proustian prose poems. Brevity and extension, lines and sentences, meditative and narrative counterbalancing elements “speak a language no known mother tongued.” Tate is a poet willing to sit with the complexity of human connection: “we seek comfort and reject it.” Her poems “swim against / the waves, held by / what resists,” and, it seems in so doing the grief-currents they swim transform into a “less insistent presence.” Isn’t that what loss eventually becomes? The Silk the Moths Ignore is a collection of lyric ache that brims with “artifacts of hope.”

The Silk the Moths Ignore, Bronwen Tate. Inlandia Books, September 2021.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

Book Review :: The Murders of Moisés Ville by Javier Sinay

The Murders of Moises Ville by Javier Sinay book cover image

Guest Post by Ira Smith

Published initially in Argentina in 2013, The Murders of Moisés Ville has only now been made available in English with a wonderful translation by Robert Croll.

In 2009, Javier Sinay, an Argentinian author and journalist, received an interesting email from his father. It referred him to an article published in the late 1940s by his great grandfather, Mijl Hacohen Sinay, detailing the murders of Jews committed in one of the first Jewish colonies in Argentina, Moisés Ville. The history of this colony, long forgotten not just by Sinay’s immediate family but by the Jewish community as a whole, prompts him to investigate the crimes that occurred over a century ago, against the backdrop of hardship and violence that afflicted the settlers.

Continue reading “Book Review :: The Murders of Moisés Ville by Javier Sinay”

New Book :: The Ultimate Havana

The Ultimate Havana: A Willie Cuesta Mystery by John Lantigua book cover image

The Ultimate Havana: A Willie Cuesta Mystery
Fiction by John Lantigua
Arte Público Press, March 2022

Willie Cuesta, former Miami Police detective turned private investigator, is struggling to pay the bills when he receives a call from an old family friend. Cesar Mendoza is the blind, elderly owner of Tabacos El Ciego, a cigar store in Little Havana. Cesar is worried about Victoria Espada, a friend from the old days in Cuba. As a young woman, she was so beautiful that cigar makers competed to put her image on their boxes. She came from a long line of tobacco growers and married a man from an old, respected clan of cigar makers. The couple, who represented one of the great cigar dynasties of all time, fled the island after the revolution, but things didn’t go well. Ernesto Espada ultimately committed suicide, leaving his widow with two young children to raise. Now, her son, a less-than-successful cigar salesman, has gone missing, and the detective is tasked with finding him.

Book Review :: Hands of Years by Riley Bounds

Hands of Years poetry by Riley Bounds book cover image

Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise

Hands of Years poetry collection by Riley Bounds chronicles a journey of faith undertaken with open eyes. While stylistically spare (“tall and slim as votive candles”), these poems reach deep, plumbing the seminal moments in the author’s spiritual life and illuminating the healing power of such moments. Death is described as a space where “life simply leaves, vagabond through zodiacal clouds and dust”; to his father, the poet writes, “Your heart was always a war drum, so stay and tithe your noise”; a child’s prayer is “proffered to Who he doesn’t know from the textless hymnal of his solar plexus, the liturgy of bone and marrow.” In the collection’s final piece, Bounds prays that he might one day “hold the hands of years and become the voice I sing, echoing up the wall of our netted souls, refracting each other’s given light.” The power of these poems lies in their meticulous imagery, their brutal honesty, and their bold confrontation with difficult truths. They alternately rattle and soothe, offering a glimpse of light after each forage into the darkness.

Hands of Years by Riley Bounds. Kelsay Press, October 2021.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of four short story collections, the most recent being Palindrome from the Texas Review Press (forthcoming September 2022). www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Out of Patients

Out of Patients a novel by Sandra Carallo Miller book cover image

Out of Patients
Fiction by Sandra Carallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, August 2022

After practicing medicine for more than thirty years in the sweltering suburbs of Phoenix, Dr. Norah Waters is weighing her options, and early retirement is looking better and better. At age fifty-eight, she questions whether she still needs to deal with midnight calls, cranky patients, and the financial headaches that come with running a small clinic. Fighting burnout and workplace melodrama, Norah gives herself one final year to find the fulfillment and satisfaction she remembers from the early years of her once-cherished career. Supported by her steadfast dog, a misfit veterinarian, and a thoughtful radiologist, Norah wrestles through a surprising assortment of obstacles, sometimes amusing and sometimes dreadful, on her way to making a final decision about her future.

Books Received July 2022

NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.” If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!

Poetry

American Narratives, T.P. Bird, Turning Point
Book of the Cold, Antonio Gamoneda, World Poetry Books
Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020
Buy a Ticket, Judith R. Robinson, Word Poetry
Cold Fire, Veronica Zondek, World Poetry Books
Coming To, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books
Flutter Kick, Anna V.Q. Ross, Red Hen Press
Gold Hill Family Audio, Corrie Lynn White, Southeast Missouri State University
Hechizo, Mark Statman, Lavendar Ink
Hers, Maria Laina, World Poetry Books
I Dreamed I was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend, Ron Koertge, Red Hen Press
Living in a Red State Blues, M. Scott Douglass, Paycock Press
The Lowly Negro, James Smith, Revolutionary Books
Love Poems in the Apocalypse, Dani Gabriel, Main Street Rag Publishing
Love’s Universe, Nin Carey Tassi, Cherry Grove Collections
Lynchings: Postcards from America, Lester Graves Lennon, WordTech Editions
The Ones with Difficult Names, David Brendan Hopes, Kelsay Books
Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Able Muse Press
Salem Revisited, Charles K. Carter, WordTech Editions
Sheltered in Place, CJ Giroux, Finishing Line Press
A Woman Somehow Dead, Amy Locklin, David Robert Books

Continue reading “Books Received July 2022”

New Book :: Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life Poetry by Peter Neil Carroll book cover image

Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life
Poetry by Peter Neil Carroll
Turning Point, January 2022

In this newest collection, Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life, Peter Neil Carroll employs a multiplicity of voices to ensure that no one is, truly, a stranger. Carroll is the author of several previous collections, including Fracking Dakota, Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, which won the Prize Americana in 2012. Other books include the memoir Keeping Time. His poems have appeared in many journals. He has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, taught history and American Studies at Stanford and Berkeley, and hosted “Booktalk” on Pacifica Radio. Read sample poems here.

Book Review :: Future Shock, Revisited

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler book cover image

Guest Post by Claude Clayton Smith

Having read Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Random House, 2018), I reread Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (Random House, 1970), which I’d devoured after the Kent State shootings sparked riots nationwide. “Events were transpiring too rapidly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche.” Hold on! That’s from the Introduction to the Romantic Period in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962), reflecting the despair felt as England’s agricultural way of life was ripped asunder by the Industrial Revolution. Compare Toffler: “The normal institutions of industrial society can no longer” [endure the] “rising rate of change in the world,” which “disturbs our inner equilibrium, altering the very way in which we experience life.” Toffler quotes Daniel P. Moynihan (1927-2003), then chief White House advisor on urban affairs, who says the United States “exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown.”

Toffler (1928-2016) witnessed the Vietnam War, Watergate, the 14.5 percent inflation of the ’80s, AIDS, the Gulf War, dot.com bubble, 9/11, the internet, Afghan War, social media, etc. In passing, Future Shock mentions “alterations in climate.” But Toffler missed Donald Trump, COVID, and January 6th. Where would he begin, if still alive, to update a new edition of Future Shock?

Reviewer bio: Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Claude Clayton Smith is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. For details visit: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

Book Review :: Clamor by Hocine Tandjaoui

Clamor nonfiction by Hocine Tandjaoui book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Clamor, Hocine Tandjaoui’s debut English-language poetic memoir presented in the text’s original French and English translations, the Algerian author tries to make sense of surviving the aggregation: “Life war songs death.” Death and war came early in Tandjaoui’s life: His mother was killed during childbirth by “raging septicemia,” and he was “not even five years old when the war broke,” “not yet seven years old when [he felt] the blast of the bomb.” Tandjaoui was born in 1949 in French-occupied (1830 – 1962) Algeria “that transformed some of the humans that occupied it into half-gods, whereas the others were reduced to subjects without rights.” Outside Tandjaoui’s window, “a musical bath” of warfare’s bullets and bombs “playing simultaneously” to the tortured, pained conversations of colonial society and jazz, blues, and classical music—the “loud speakers were in fierce competition, pushing to the max, projecting a sonorous magma into the surroundings.” Clamor offers Anglophone readers “this setting in which a person comes first to life, then to consciousness”—adult reflections and reminiscences of the sounds of Tandjaoui’s childhood, complete with a discography (Piaf, Simone, Joplin, Holiday, etc.) that was a “resonance chamber” for his grief. Hocine Tandjaoui’s Clamor: “between celebration and weeping, an ululation made of love, despair, and tenderness.”

Clamor by Hocine Tandjaoui; translated by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Litmus Press, April 2021.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Hechizo

Hechizo
Poetry by Mark Statman
Lavender Ink, January 2022

Lavender Ink poetry by Mark Statman book cover image

An hechizo is a spell, an incantation that attempts to effect change in the world via language. Mark Statman’s Hechizo is woven through a world of personal demons, past and present, a world facing a pandemic and social, political, and environmental dissolution. These incantations take aim at the world from the smallest lizard that crawls into view to overarching political structures. It’s a register not seen in his work before—of foreboding, the forbidden, concluding in tentative, possible joy.

New Book :: The Sustain Pedal

The Sustain Pedal poetry by Carol Jennings book cover image

The Sustain Pedal
Poetry by Carol Jennings
Cherry Grove Collections, February 2022

In The Sustain Pedal, Carol Jennings continues the poetic journey she began in The Dead Spirits at the Piano. Her poems create a connection with the composers she listens to and plays on the piano-Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn-as well as with the natural world she loves and mourns for what is being lost. Retreating glaciers, volcanoes, coral reefs, viruses, the outer edge of the solar system-her poetic craft evokes both what we cannot control and what we must learn to control to survive. Read sample poems here.

Book Review :: Acreage by Stephanie Garon

Acreage poetry by Stephanie Garon book cover image

Guest Post by Christine Scanlon

This wonderful debut collection of poetry, Acreage, written by the visual artist Stephanie Garon, is a product of artistic accumulation where a self-conscious regard for the materiality of words is a characteristic of her poems. Many are finely sculpted pieces like, “Undercurrent,” mimicking the movement of oak leaves caught in an eddy. Repetition of the phrase, “how long can they stay under,” becomes a current pulling down both leaves and poet, and with panic, we realize all may stay “un/der.” Embodiment of a slow-motion disappearance is also a central theme in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” after WH Auden’s poem—where instead of Icarus, the central emptiness in Garon’s poem is represented by the “emptied / stamen” and the carcasses “of eight // stale petals curled.” This carnage, caused by a human hand (“Fingernail-pierced / stems / scattered”), also compromises the poet (“I / too / collapse”), and as we contemplate the artist’s imminent absence, we are left to wonder who will make the marks that cultivate meaning? There is no answer, but Garon gives us a sense in the final poem, “Feral,” that we are nearing the end of something (the Anthropocene) and may all become, like the poet, a “ravaged memory of acreage.”

Acreage by Stephanie Garon. akinoga press, December 2021.

Reviewer bio: Christine Scanlon is a Brooklyn-based poet with a collection of poems, A Hat on the Bed (Barrow Street Press), and work published in such journals as Adjacent Pineapple, Dream Pop Press, Flag + Void, and La Vague. She is a graduate of the New School MFA program.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Yazoo Clay

Yazoo Clay stories by Schuyler Dickson published by Livingston Press book cover image

Yazoo Clay
Stories by Schuyler Dickson
Livingston Press, August 2022

Co-winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, Yazoo Clay is a collection of character-driven deep south stories from writer and regenerative farmer Schuyler Dickson. Experimental, humorous, and thought-provoking, this is a book “about the collapsing floor of living.” Dickson earned a BA in Southern Studies from Ole Miss and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern. Readers can find an excerpt from the book here: “Happy Birthday.”

New Book :: All Is Leaf

All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations by John T. Price published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations
Nonfiction by John T. Price
University of Iowa Press, June 2022

All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations by John T. Price draws inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp—and from the leaf as a symbol of all change, growth, and renewal—and explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: “the how of the organism—that keeps your humanity alive.” Price employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.

Book Review :: Morgan by Boyer Rickel

Morgan (A Lyric) nonfiction by Boyer Rickel book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Morgan (A Lyric), winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Competition, Boyer Rickel, a most open and ethical writer, writes out of “a sensation so precise” what it means to love—beyond shame or humiliation, in expansive and humble ways—not as “the hero,” but as “the hero’s sidekick.” Were this chapbook a musical composition, the minor scale “branching patterns of sound” referring to the relationship between men and their mothers, the luxury of who gets to age, the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, writing and reading poetry, and listening to music—the harmonic and cacophonic backdrop of lives at the center of a love song. A love story—between one who lives openly as a gay man and one who is more secretive in his choices, one in middle age and healthy, and one in his thirties, living with the complications of cystic fibrosis. The major scale “branching” the complexities of personality (“there might be many Morgans”), relationship (“separate states of extremity”), and eroticism (“denial begets desire”); the trappings of love and illness; the primary and secondary gains of caretaking—“a trade of need for need.” This is elegiac writing that “remove[s] us (readers) from time” as love and death do, but perhaps more than centering on death, this writing exalts lover and beloved—“To touch a boundary, to feel a limit”—leaving as much love on the page as possible.

Morgan (A Lyric) by Boyer Rickel. Gold Line Press, May 2022.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Almost: My Life in Theater

Almost: My Life in the Theater a memoir by Roselee Blooston published by Apprentice House Press book cover image

Almost: My Life in Theater
Memoir by Roselee Blooston
Apprentice House Press, September 2022

Almost: My Life in the Theater tells the story of Roselee Blooston’s decades-long struggle to fulfill her early promise by becoming a professional actress, taking her to far-flung locales from Europe to Texas to New York City. Along the way, she encounters several Oscar winners and nominees—including Meryl Streep, Greer Garson, and Olympia Dukakis—who each had a profound effect on her self-image and trajectory, though no one had more influence than her mother, a visual artist, whose life served as both cautionary tale and beacon. Blooston can lay claim to trailblazer status as a solo performer, but she asks herself and the reader to deeply consider the true meaning of success and the value of a creative life. Her calling, commitment, and longing for recognition will resonate with anyone who has followed a passion, been thwarted in the attempt, and then successfully and happily reinvented themselves. Apprentice House is an entirely student-managed book publisher with students at Loyola University Maryland responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Learn more here.

New Book :: summonings

summonings poetry by Raena Shirali published by Black Lawrence Press book cover image

summonings
Poetry by Raena Shirali
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022

Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali’s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. Winner of The Hudson Prize, these poems interrogate the political implications and shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author’s Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection, Shirali asks how first- and second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it, wondering aloud about those lineages’ relationships to misogyny and violence. These poems explore how antiquated and existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India and America inform each culture’s treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali’s poetics in GILT, her “comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry.” summonings offers a commentary on power and patriarchy, on authorial privilege and the shifting role of witness, and ultimately, on an ethical poetics, grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.

New Book :: Wise to the West

Wise to the West poetry by Wendy Videlock published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Wise to the West
Poetry by Wendy Videlock
Able Muse Press, November 2022

In Wise to the West, Wendy Videlock embraces her Western terrain and surroundings—family, neighbor, barbershop, morning shower, coyote, badger, wolf, blackbird, hawk, canyon, mesa, mountain—with songs, odes, witticisms, lamentations. Along the way, she tilts toward the grand view of the world around—relaying turns of uncertainty or affirmation, history or the latest news, myths and the mystic—and gifting readers musings and meditations in her unique style full of quirks, wit, wisdom, and surprising turns. Wendy Videlock lives on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and their assorted critters. Her work appears in Hudson Review, Oprah Magazine, Poetry, Dark Horse, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and other venues.

Book Review :: Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore

Razzmatazz a novel by Christopher Moore book cover image

Guest Post by James Scruton

If you need a beach read to get you through high summer, look no further than Razzmatazz, Christopher Moore’s follow-up to his hilarious page-turner Noir. (Make it a full vacation and read both novels.) This time out, our hero Sammy, his main squeeze Stilton (don’t call her “the Cheese”), and their unlikely roster of demi-monde pals must dodge both gangsters and cops to solve a double murder, locate a rich nob’s runaway daughter, and retrieve a mysterious relic before even more chaos ensues in late-1940’s San Francisco. In true noirish fashion, most of the action takes place in the wee small hours, when, as Sammy relates, the fog has “swallowed the city like a damp woolen crocodile.” Zany, with devious plotting and enough wise-cracking dialogue to fricassee a Maltese falcon, Razzmatazz is another healthy serving of Moore’s signature recipe: equal measures of screwball comedy, hard-boiled mystery, and X-Files-like otherworldliness. (Don’t skip the “Afterword and Author’s Note.”)

Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore. William Morrow, May 2022.

Reviewer bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry as well as dozens of reviews, essays, and articles on poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists

Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists poetry by Laynie Browne published by Wave Books book cover image

Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists
Poetry by Laynie Browne
Wave Books, June 2022

Laynie Browne’s latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation. Browne’s collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.

New Book :: The Lowly Negro

The Lowly Negro poetry by James Smith published by Revolutionary Books book cover image

The Lowly Negro
Poetry by James Smith
Revolutionary Books, May 2022

Revolutionary Books is a new imprint of Artvoices Books, seeking to publish “Poets who embody the essence of the revolutionary: fearless, passionate and unwavering.” This, their debut title, The Lowly Negro by James Smith, is a written account of a poor, destitute, and uneducated inner-city Black male’s life and journey in the U.S., showing his ability to sustain and survive by weathering the lows as well as the highs. As an African American, he is both an invisible man and one who believes he is the sum of his experiences. The poems relate how Others believe his existence is an illusion of rehearsed lines, walking with his eyes closed, hoping for the best. The Lowly Negro is a singular voice representing countless men and women from disenfranchised and marginalized communities. The forgotten and neglected of society who only have the written word as their protest find a voice in this collection. Author James Smith is an American poet who comments, “I write for catharsis: my weapon of choice. I am a black man who has survived Hell on Earth in search of forgiveness, enlightenment and sanity.” Poem samples and a companion film by Jameson Stokes can be found here.

New Book :: Love’s Universe

Love's Universe poems by Nina Carey Tassi book cover image

Love’s Universe: New & Selected Poems
Poetry by Nina Carey Tassi
Cherry Grove Collections, April 2022

Nina Carey Tassi’s intimate poems in Love’s Universe explore the myriad ways that love finds a home in human hearts, from searing first desire through the oceanic depths of marriage and family to soul-piercing faith and the uplifting joys of nature and one’s country; not least is the unexpected miracle of suffering, all suggesting that love indeed animates the universe. Read sample poems here.

New Book :: Without Saints

Without Saints essays by Christopher Locke published by Black Lawrence Press book cover image

Without Saints
Essays by Christopher Locke
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022

Runner-up for the Monadnock Essay Collection Prize, Without Saints by Christopher Locke is a journey to rediscover hope between the ruins: Poet Christopher Locke was baptized by Pentecostals, absolved by punk rock, and nearly consumed by narcotics. Like the propulsive Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Without Saints is a brief, muscular ride into the heart of American desolation, and the love one finds waiting for them instead. Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His poems, fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award and the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award. He now lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at North Country Community College.

New Book :: American Dude Ranch

American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West by Lynn Downey published by University of Oklahoma Press book cover image

American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West
Nonfiction by Lynn Downey
The University of Oklahoma Press, March 2022

Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America’s original western vacation, is much more interesting and deeply connected with the culture and history of the American West. In American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey opens new perspectives on this buckaroo getaway, with all its implications for deciphering the American imagination. The book is 246 pages with 32 black and white illustrations.

New Book :: Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina poetry by Dara Barrois/Dixon published by Wave Books book cover image

Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina
Poetry by Dara Barrois/Dixon
Wave Books, June 2022

With the same tender honesty found in all of Dara Barrois/Dixon’s (formerly Dara Wier) poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Barrois/Dixon brings profound attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and to the stories that shape our worlds. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express “love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage.”

New Book :: All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea

All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea and Other Stories by Khanh Ha published by EastOver Press book cover image

All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea and Other Stories
Fiction by Khanh Ha
EastOver Press, June 2022

From Vietnam to America, Khanh Ha’s All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a story collection that brings readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abound in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book. Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy. All the Rivers Flow into the Sea was selected as a winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction.

June 2022 eLitPak :: Check out Madville Publishing’s Summer Reading List!

Screenshot of Madville Publishing's Summer Reading List flyer for the June 2022 eLitPak
click image to open PDF

Madville publishing is pleased to announce our summer reading list! Our authors worry at questions of family, home, and belonging in this amazing quartet of books. All available now for order or preorder: 

  • Worrisome Creatures: Poems by Kate Sweeney
  • Genesis Road a novel by Susan O’Dell Underwood
  • Provenance: A Novel by Sue Mell
  • Secret City: Poems by Katherine Smith

View flyer or visit website to learn more.

If you’re not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, view the full June 2022 eLitPak here.

June 2022 eLitPak :: Summer Titles from Livingston Press at University of West Alabama

Screenshot of Summer 2022 Titles from Livingston Press flyer for the June 2022 eLitPak
click image to open PDF

New summer titles from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama include a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. A story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.

If you’re not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, view the full June 2022 eLitPak here.

June 2022 eLitPak :: Last Call! North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books

Screenshot of Winning Writers' June 2022 eLitPak flyer for the North Street Book Prize
click image to open PDF

Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $8,000 in its eighth annual North Street competition, and $16,750 in all. The top eight winners will enjoy additional benefits from our co-sponsors BookBaby and Carolyn Howard-Johnson. Gifts for everyone who enters. Submit books published in any year and on any self-publishing platform. $70 entry fee. Enter online or by mail by June 30. Learn more at our website and view flyer for full details.

If you’re not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, view the full June 2022 eLitPak here.

New Book :: Oxblood

Oxblood poetry by Nicole Caruso Garcia published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Oxblood
Poetry by Nicole Caruso-Garcia
Able Muse Press, October 2022

Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia’s debut poetry collection, testifies unflinchingly about the short- and long-term effects of a college student’s rape by her fiancé. As the poet engages with this serious topic, her arsenal includes wit, wordplay, and even humor. The diverse structures of traditional received forms—the sonnet, the sestina, various French repeating forms, the Afghan landay, blues tercets—form interesting contrasts with free verse poems in this collection. Oxblood was a finalist for the 2022 Able Muse Book Award.

New Book :: Broadsided Press Anthology

Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 book cover image

Broadsided Press Anthology
Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020
Provincetown Arts Press, April 2022

Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaborations, 2005-2020 is an anthology that celebrates Broadsided Press’s mission of “putting literature and art on the streets.” I have always loved the work of this organization, and since its founding, Broadsided has released one beautifully designed, original, letter-sized collaboration of poetry and art (a broadside) each month: a unique collaboration between a visual artist and a writer that is a work of art in itself. These were available for free download each month so that “vectors” could print them and post them with many taking pictures and sharing these on the site. Now, for the first time, more than fifty broadsides selected from over 300 published the past 15 years are presented in a first-ever book form alongside the interviews with artists and poets who collaborated to create them and photographs of the work in public spaces.

Contest :: New American Press Extends 2022 New American Fiction Prize Deadline

2022 New American Fiction Prize

That’s right! If you missed the June 15 deadline for the 2022 New American Fiction Prize, you’re in luck! New American Press has announced they have extended the deadline to July 1. This year’s final judge is WEIKE WANG. Winner receives $1,500, publication, and 25 copies. Swing by their ad in the NewPages Classifieds for more information.

New Book :: My Haunted Home

My Haunted Home stories by Victoria Hood book cover image

My Haunted Home
Fiction by Victoria Hood
University of Alabama/FC2, October 2022

The stories in My Haunted Home by Victoria Hood delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” Hood explores the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder. In this debut story collection, Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.

New Book :: Wings & Other Things

Wings and Other Things stories by Chauna Craig book cover image

Wings & Other Things
Fiction by Chauna Craig
Press 53, September 2022

Wings & Other Things by Chauna Craig is a book of migrations. Its characters flutter and flap, take off and land, then take off again as they seek the places they belong. These are characters caught in transition: a widow searching for a past self on an “Impossible Blue” coast, lovers explaining to the police and themselves why they’re hiding in a Nebraska cornfield. a teacher struggling to be understood on a flight from Chengdu, a stranded artist riding with a stranger on a highway haunted y the ghost of a woman who never made it home. Each story is a transformation as Craig turns railroad tracks into an “infinite number line” and a lightning bolt into a “tentacle of the unseen.” A plastic fork becomes a parable of fragility, and a “scrap moon” is an image of what is lost and what yet remains.

New Book :: The Illusion of Simple

The Illusion of Simple a novel by Charles Forrest Jones book cover image

The Illusion of Simple
Fiction by Charles Forrest Jones
University of Iowa Press, May 2022

The Illusion of Simple by Charles Forrest Jones begins in a dry Kansas riverbed where a troop of young girls finds a human hand. This discovery leads Billy Spire, the tough and broken sheriff of Ewing County, to investigate and confront the depths of his community and of himself: the racism, the dying economy, the lies and truths of friendship, grievances of the past and present, and even his own injured marriage. But like any town where people still breathe, there is also love and hope and the possibility of redemption. To flyover folks, Ewing County appears nothing more than a handful of empty streets amid crop circles and the meandering, depleted Arkansas River. But the truth of this place—the interwoven lives and stories—is anything but simple. Charles Forrest Jones is former director of the Kansas University Public Management Center and believes that “public policy is rooted in the human condition, there is a place for the articulate, compelling, even beautiful.”

Sponsored :: New Book :: Refugee

cover of Refugee by Pamela Uschuk

Refugee 
Poetry by Pamela Uschuck
Red Hen Press, Spring 2022

Refugee deals with political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.  This collection confronts and explores xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, environmental destruction and political tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, Pamela also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death.

“With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

New Book :: Benefit Street

Benefit Street a novel by Adria Bernardi book cover image

Benefit Street
Fiction by Adria Bernardi
University of Alabama Press/FC2, August 2022

Benefit Street by Adria Bernardi is set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country and tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime. The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.

Book Review :: Don’t Know Tough by Eli Cranor

Don't Know Tough a novel by Eli Granor book cover image

Guest Post by Ira Smith

Eli Cranor’s debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, published by Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press, is not your typical football novel. Rather, it depicts a brutal slice of life in rural Arkansas, where high school football is king and is all that matters. The protagonist, Billy Lowe, is the archetypal angry young man. An ignorant high school senior and star of the football team, Billy’s anger is compounded by his mother’s abusive boyfriend, who lives with them in their trailer in rural Arkansas. After being beaten by the boyfriend and hitting him back, Billy takes his anger out on a teammate during practice, injuring him. Then, his Mom’s abusive boyfriend is found murdered, and Billy becomes a suspect. From that point, the novel hurtles at breakneck speed to its surprising conclusion. I could not stop reading Don’t Cry Tough. Cranor’s writing is riveting, and his characterizations are perfect. Despite my initial impression of Billy as simple and stupid, as the book goes on, the author skillfully transforms him into a complex human being I actually cared for. As for the setting in rural Arkansas, I could picture the trailers, the woods, and the poverty-stricken homes where some of the characters live. The football scenes were quite well done, and rightly so as the author did play professional football. Despite the twists and turns, all the plot lines were brilliantly resolved. This is Eli Cranor’s first novel, and I already can’t wait for his follow-up.

Don’t Know Tough by Eli Cranor. Soho Crime, March 2022.

Reviewer bio: Ira Smith is a retired physician for whom reading has been a lifelong passion. Favorite genres are science fiction, noir, and history.

New Book :: We Were Angry

We Were Angry a novella and stories by Jennifer S. Davis book cover image

We Were Angry: A Novella & Stories
Fiction by Jennifer S. Davis
Press 53, August 2022

We Were Angry by Jennifer S. Davis, introduces readers to a group of friends in small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate across generations. In Davis’s world, Alabaman is more than a fictional setting. It’s a scene for interrogating power, pain, and what it means to live in – and to leave – the American South. In a linked collection of stories shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions where missing women are rumored to be buried. Transversing these red dirt roads are mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars, prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of rejected housepets. Winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.

New Book :: Voices from the Other Side of Death

Voices from the Other Side of Death poetry by Ariel Dorfman book cover image

Voices from the Other Side of Death
Poetry by Ariel Dorfman
Arte Público Press, June 2022

Voices from the Other Side of Death by Ariel Dorfman offers readers a series of poems written from the perspective of deceased historical figures to contemporary politicians and soldiers, warning about the need for reckoning and atonement. In one, Pablo Picasso speaks to Colin Powell, asking why his famous painting depicting the horror of war, Guernica, was covered when the secretary of state spoke about the invasion of Iraq at the United Nations. Others explore connections to loved ones, including “the love of my life, Angélica, the woman who helped me survive exile and tribulations and peopled my world with hope.” Dorfman writes about the passionate love the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan felt for his wife, which led to the construction of the Taj Mahal, and imagines conversations between William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, who died within hours of each other. These poems share the most human of emotions and expose Dorfman’s vulnerability as he embarks on the last leg of his journey.

New Book :: Shame

Shame autofiction by Grant Maierhofer book cover image

Shame
Autofiction by Grant Maierhofer
University of Alabama Press/FC2, September 2022

Shame by Grant Maierhofer is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of memory and self. Here we meet the author at various points within his life then, now, and in the future, as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior. Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.

New Book :: I Got Mine

I Got Mine memoir by John Nichols book cover image

I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer
Memoir by John Nichols
University of New Mexico Press, June 2022

I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer is the memoir of John Nichols as seen through the lens of his writing. Everything that went into making him a writer and eventually found an outlet in his work—his education, family, wives, children, friends, enemies, politics, and place—is told from the point of view of his daily practice of writing. Beginning with his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, published in 1965 when he was just twenty-four, Nichols shares his highs and lows: his ambivalent relationship with money; his growing disenchantment with the hypocrisy of capitalism; and his love-hate relationship with Hollywood—including the years-long struggle of working with director Robert Redford on the film version of The Milagro Beanfield War, which was filmed around Truchas and featured many of Nichols’ northern New Mexico neighbors. I Got Mine captures Nichols’ lifelong engagement with progressive political causes, his passionate interest in and identification with ordinary people, and his deep connection to the land.

New Book :: tender gravity

tender gravity poetry by Marybeth Holleman book cover image

tender gravity
Poetry by Marybeth Hollman
Red Hen Press, August 2022

tender gravity is Marybeth Holleman’s collection of poetry that charts her quest for relationships to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates loss — the loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. “do not think,” she says to her mother, “that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart.” Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: “step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is.” In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, Holleman’s exquisitely attentive immersion offers clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.

Contest :: 1 Week Left to Enter 2022 New American Fiction Prize

2022 New American Fiction Prize

That’s right! There’s only one week left to enter your full-length manuscripts to the 2022 New American Fiction Prize from New American Press. Manuscripts can be novels, novellas, collections of stories, etc. Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay (Random House 2022) is the final judge. Enter your manuscripts by June 15, 2022! See their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

New Book :: But Still, Music

But Still Music poetry by Anne Pitkin book cover image

But Still, Music
Poetry by Anne Pitkin
Pleasure Boat Studio, September 2022

Anne Pitkin’s third book, But Still, Music spans her childhood as a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South to the period of her grown daughter’s death. The poems in this collection visit the disquieting contradictions of a southern childhood marked by honeysuckle and lightning bugs and the racist culture that was the air Pitkin breathed. A number of poems address the loss of her daughter. Still, in the end, as she says in the final poem. ‘‘Tide”: “There you’ve been, loves of my life. / There you’ve changed me, one by one. . . “

New Book :: Gold Hill Family Audio

Gold Hill Family Audio poetry by Corrie Lynn White book cover image

Gold Hill Family Audio
Poetry by Corrie Lynn White
Southeast Missouri State University Press, October 2022

Winner of the 2021 Cowles Poetry Prize, Gold Hill Family Audio is Corrie Lynn White’s debut poetry collection. Her poetry has appeared in Oxford American, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Mid American Review, and Mississippi Review, among other publications. Originally from Gold Hill, North Carolina, she holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as a journalist and was named the 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry.

New Book :: Glorious Fiends

Glorious Fiends fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam book cover image

Glorious Fiends
Fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Underland Press, September 2022

When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she’s confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures — or he’ll drag her there instead. Reunited with Medusa and Mx. Hyde, Roxanne and her macabre girl gang must become monster hunters themselves and fight for the future of their friendship. Gory, sexy, silly, touching — Glorious Fiends asks who the real monsters are and if the bonds that we think are solely human are really ours alone. This Hammer-inspired odyssey is a nostalgic trip through ‘80s horror tropes — with modern sensibilities.