INTERVIEWS

Burning Behind the Unnamable:
an interview with David Hoenigman
by David Moscovich

FEATURES

Noteworthy Reprint:
Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool
The Writings of Jack Smith

This collection of essays by experimental filmmaker Smith show that the wonder and gorgeousness of art, as he saw it, was in making glory out of junk. Reviewed by Spencer Dew

Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein

A new book collects writings and remembrances of this spirited and fiercely intelligent young woman. Reviewed by Ellen Kennedy Michel

FICTION

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke

In Burton Pike’s refreshing new translation, the reader encounters an emergent Rilkean persona in full flowering. Reviewed by Tim Keane

Vilnius Poker
Ricardas Gavelis

Gavelis, considered Lithuania’s greatest novelist, captures the psychology of a protagonist tortured by his history and unable to explain his present-day life. Reviewed by Alex Starace

Tokyo Fiancée
Amélie Nothomb

Nothomb writes about a younger version of herself, staunchly defending her independence against the onslaught of romance. Reviewed by Ryan Michael Williams

The Lemoine Affair
Marcel Proust

This novella by Proust remarks not so much on the renowned 1908 diamond scandal as it does on the foibles of human nature. Reviewed by Alyssa Pelish

Voices from the North
New Writing from Norway
edited by Vigdis Ofte & Steinar Sivertsen

This anthology interjects itself between the geographies of somewhere and nowhere as authors traverse their Stavangerian roots. Reviewed by Poul Houe

NONFICTION

Antoine’s Alphabet
Watteau and His World
Jed Perl

Perl employs an alphabetical structure to show the pleasure he takes in Antoine Watteau’s art of “silken surfaces and fleeting emotions.” Reviewed by W. C. Bamberger

Rimbaud
The Double Life of a Rebel
Edmund White

White provides a readable and absorbing critical biography of the masterful poet and inventor of the prose poem. Reviewed by Burke Bindbeutel

On Criticism
Noel Carroll

Carroll’s work reclaims the importance of the critic as qualified determiner of artistic intent in this uneven but ultimately rewarding work. Reviewed by Nigel Beale

Punctuation
Art, Politics, and Play
Jennifer DeVere Brody

Brody’s book performs at every turn a subversive politics that celebrates the margins as places where the real deal goes down. Reviewed by Gregory Kirk Murray

Disorientations
Art On The Margins of the Contemporary
Travis Jeppesen

Disorientations collects Jeppesen’s art criticism, reviews of exhibitions, interviews with expatriate artists, and reports from the sets of film shootings. Reviewed by John Holten

POETRY

The O Mission Repo
Travis Macdonald
and
Letters from Abu Ghraib
Joshua Casteel

These unconventional books defamiliarize the newspeak that has flattened our readings of 9/11 and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, bringing us into a new interpretive relationship with the recent history of the United States. Reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson

Dropping the Bow
Poems of Ancient India
translated by Andrew Schelling

Schelling’s immersion in Indian life helped to craft these fine translations from another part of the world and a long-gone era in history. Reviewed by Robert Milo Baldwin

Signal from Draco
New and Selected Poems
Mebane Robertson

The reckless abandon that characterizes Robertson’s best poems reveal him to be proficient in what Robert Bly called “the leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again.” Reviewed by Christopher Kondrich

Alpha Zulu
Gary Copeland Lilley

Lilley’s poems delve into the heart of the American city in this arresting collection. Reviewed by John Jacob

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance
edited by Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgwick

Gathered from a 2004 symposia on curating as a form of critical intervention into culture, this collection of essays by twelve British curators achieves a cumulative definition of the curatorial role. Reviewed by Patricia Healy McMeans