The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 1996

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 1996

Introduction.
June 22, 1996... This issue contains work by ten authors representing three distinct cultures that coexist in Finland: Finnish, Sami, and Finland-Swedish. Most of the contributors are young, avant-garde writers who have not yet been introduced to...

Markku Eskelinen.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Markku Eskelinen (b. 1959) has published experimental novels, journalism, horror stories, and critical essays. Easily the most iconoclastic figure on the Finnish literary scene, he moves effortlessly between the TV studio, the theater, and the...

From nonstop, or missing in fiction a synoptic margin to a trilogy.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... I 2 Obviously, everything is fiction. But you believe some stories and not others. That is why you are here, and that is where we can begin. We have to start from what we have in fact already done. Does that require a comma? Let's...

Mariaana Jantti.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Mariaana Jantti (full name: Gia Ruusu-Mariaana Fieandt-Jantti, b. 1953) has written the most radically experimental work in the Finnish language. Amorfiaana (1986), her punning, hectically free-associating first novel, is oblivious to...

From Amorfiaana.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Why am I telling you this story? Because it doesn't exist. Because it is to happen as if you were watching a long-haired child on a tricycle in the street from your high and distant window and felt already at this height the vibration of a...

Kari Kontio.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Kari Kontio (b. 1956) has studied political science, philosophy, theology, and drama and has worked in journalism, television, radio, and the theater. In addition to publishing essays and fiction, he has been a parliamentary candidate, a...

From the last of his kind.(Fictional Work)
June 22, 1996... Pen and Sword When I left the army and took up my studies, I immediately joined the leftwing group of intellectual history students led by my friend Aimo as well as the university's Reserve Officers' Club headed by another old friend,...

Leena Krohn.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Leena Krohn (b. 1947) is best known for her essays and short stories. Much of her recent work straddles the line between narrative and essay, yielding a sort of cerebral lyricism that focuses on a range of scientific, technological, and...

Lucilia illustris.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Darling, do you remember what we stood gazing at in the glow of a summer morning? --Charles Baudelaire An abandoned railway spur led to a factory yard overgrown with brushwood. It was located at the extreme north end of the city, in a...

Kirsti Paltto.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Kirsti Paltto (b. 1947) is one of the most prolific authors working in Sami, the language of the indigenous minority inhabiting Lapland, or Samiland, in the Russian and Finno-Scandinavian Arctic. She currently chairs the Sami writers' union....

From run safely, my flock.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Stars of the sky, don't cease to shine above my land nannago na-a, voija-a voija-a! Paths of my ancestors, don't become overgrown nannago na-a, voija-a voija-a! The first war winter passed. There was a shortage of shop...

Petter Sairanen.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Petter Sairanen (b. 1958) studied at the Finnish Theater Academy and currently works for the Finnish Broadcasting Company. He has written screenplays and fiction, and his play Maailmasta ei ole mitaan hyotya (The World Is Useless) received its...

From electric lighting.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... A Little Portrait Gallery from a Border Post in the North 1 I went to the marsh, as usual. Midsummer had passed a few days before. It was warm and it started to rain there on the edge of the marsh. A helicopter flew over me and I took...

Hans Selo.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Hans Selo (b. 1945) caused a sensation in 1970 when he published Diiva (The Poseur), a stream-of-consciousness novel about the 1960s, which won the prestigious Erkko Prize for the best literary debut. Fifteen years of silence followed before...

From cloudcomplexion.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... "Dad, down on all fours, inside, in his overalls, wielding the grinding-board, was surrounded by articles that contained his history. Identity! It was like they were trying to tell me about it: the cement smoothing plates, the seaming irons,...

Raija Siekkinen.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Raija Siekkinen (b. 1953) specializes in the short story and has won a string of major literary awards, including the prestigious Runeberg Prize in 1993. A keen traveler, she has spent time in France and Italy, and translates fiction from...

The black sun.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Life had set a trap, the existence of which did not become apparent before it was already too late: the trap had snapped shut, divided time. There now existed a before and an after, and all you could do was try to cope. The wind drove fallen...

Lars Sund.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Lars Sund (b. 1953) combines solid historical research with consummate storytelling. Colorado Avenue, which won a number of prizes in Finland and Sweden, describes the life of Finland-Swedish immigrants in the United States at the beginning of...

From Colorado Avenue.(Excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Hanna's great love had lain dormant within her like a she-bear in its winter lair for almost a quarter of a century, patiently waiting for Ed Ness to come walking up Colorado Avenue in Telluride one warm blue evening in the summer of 1897 when...

Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa.(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... The musician, artist, and poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa (b. 1943) is a leading figure in contemporary Sami culture. A charismatic performer and ambassador of his people, he has nurtured and transfigured the artistic inheritance of the Sami,...

From The Sun, My Father.(Poem)(Poem)
June 22, 1996... From The Sun, My Father 558. as if I myself inscribe but often I fly to the other side and no longer know life turns pushes into action as if I myself was doing it...

Evan Dara. The Lost Scrapbook.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Evan Dara. The Lost Scrapbook. FC2, 1995.476 pp. $21.95. The first thing the reader of Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook sees are two mottoes: from Kierkegaard, "To honor every man, absolutely every man, is the truth"; and from Blake, "O let...

William T. Vollmann. The Atlas.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... William T. Vollmann. The Atlas. Viking, 1996. 461 pp. $27.95. I admit to being a Vollmann addict. I can never get enough of his work. It almost borders on obsession, and sometimes worries me. What a joy, though, to get my hands on The...

Peter Esterhazy. A Little Hungarian Pornography.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Peter Esterhazy. A Little Hungarian Pornography. Trans. Judith Sollosy. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995. 215 pp. $24.95. Routinely placed among Hungarian literature's postmodern defiers of a traditionalism that since 1948 often meant...

Ilan Stavans. The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Ilan Stavans. The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories. Trans. David Unger, Harry Morales, the author, and others. Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1996. 196 pp. $22.50. Long-time readers of RCF will recognize the name Ilan Stavans: he has...

Eva Figes. The Knot.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Eva Figes. The Knot. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996. 170 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. This novel explores the life of its protagonist, Anna, from her birth to her own motherhood. While a number of novels by contemporary women writers have...

Diamela Eltit. The Fourth World.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Diamela Eltit. The Fourth World. Trans. Dick Gerdes. Nebraska, 1995. 114 pp. Paper: $10.00; Sacred Cow. Trans. Amanda Hopkinson. Serpent's Tail, 1995. 106 pp. Paper: $12.99. Diamela Eltit is a performance and video artist known for her work...

Peter Hoeg. The History of Danish Dreams.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Peter Hoeg. The History of Danish Dreams. Trans. Barbara Haveland. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. 356 pp. $24.00. I admire this intriguing novel. It is a challenging text because it apparently questions the very notion of its form. If we...

Antoine Volodine. Naming the Jungle.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Antoine Volodine. Naming the Jungle. Trans. Linda Coverdale. The New Press, 1995. 167 pp. $18.95. The rain forest of Antoine Volodine's Naming the Jungle is a far cry from Longfellow's "forest primeval"; nor does it resemble Tarzan's vines...

Vassilis Vassilikos. And Dreams Are Dreams.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Vassilis Vassilikos. And Dreams Are Dreams. Seven Stories Press, 1996. 261 pp. $18.95. Vassilikos interweaves seven fictions into a novel that is partly magic realism, partly metafiction, and wholly concerned with transformations. His...

Augusto Monterroso. Complete Works and Other Stories.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Augusto Monterroso. Complete Works and Other Stories. Trans. Edith Grossman. Univ. of Texas Press, 1995. 152 pp. Paper: $12.95. Monterroso is one of a handful of consistently strong Latin American experimenters who have had almost no...

Michael Martone. Seeing Eye.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Michael Martone. Seeing Eye. Zoland, 1995. 192 pp. $20.95. A writer of historical fiction faces a choice: Emphasize the historically important or what was relevant day to day? Lincoln or Lincoln Logs? Michael Martone, happily, writes out of...

Michael Hemmingson. Crack Hotel.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Michael Hemmingson. Crack Hotel. Permeable Press, 1996. 55 pp. Paper: $3.50. Hemmingson has provided a good study of corruption in Crack Hotel. He begins with a drifter, Mudd, with no real past other than what can be guessed from a leather...

Antonio Lobo Antunes. Act of the Damned.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Antonio Lobo Antunes. Act of the Damned. Trans. Richard Zenith. Grove, 1995. 246 pp. $22.00. Portuguese author Lobo Antunes, among the world's best and least appreciated novelists, seems incapable of writing less than brilliantly. He sets...

Brooks Hansen. The Chess Garden, or The Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Brooks Hansen. The Chess Garden, or The Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. 480 pp. $22.00. The title of this startling text is strange. What is a "chess garden"? Is it a "place" in which we play chess? Or...

Steve Katz. Swanny's Ways.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Steve Katz. Swanny's Ways. Sun & Moon, 1995. 550 pp. $22.95. These are the memoirs of William Swanson (Swanny), introduced by entomologist Jackson Ryan as "confessions, or narrations, or barely controlled fits of imagination." The novel...

Dennis Barone. Abusing the Telephone.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Dennis Barone. Abusing the Telephone. Drogue Press (P.O. Box 1157, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276), 1994. 81 pp. Paper: $10.00. In Abusing the Telephone Dennis Barone offers fictions that do not operate according to principles of linear...

Shelley Berc. The Shape of Wilderness.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Shelley Berc. The Shape of Wilderness. Coffee House, 1995. 279 pp. Paper: $12.95. The Shape of Wilderness is a strange and somewhat exhaustively panoramic novel whose prose has a Whitmanesque yawp to it, a nineteenth-century "Can Do! Give...

Eugene K. Garber. The Historian: Six Fantasies of the American Experience.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Eugene K. Garber. The Historian: Six Fantasies of the American Experience. TriQuarterly Books, 1995. 233 pp. Paper: $14.95. Winner of the William Goyen Prize for Fiction, The Historian is a meditation on the nature of history as well as a...

Raymond Roussel. How I Wrote Certain of My Books.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Raymond Roussel. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Ed. Trevor Winkfield. Trans. by the editor, John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, and others. Exact Change, 1995. 264 pp. Paper: $15.95. You need to know the work of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) to...

Joanna Scott. The Manikin.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Joanna Scott. The Manikin. Holt, 1996. 276 pp. $22.50. Shrieking "Worship me," a snowy owl wings its way southward--to be shot down by a young hunter's rifle. Once stuffed and mounted, the owl becomes the brooding animus of The Manikin, the...

William O'Rourke. Notts.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... William O'Rourke. Notts. Marlowe, 1996. 241 pp. Cloth: $22.95. This novel describes the journeys of two young Irish-Americans around Britain during the 1984-85 miners strike. Michael meets Jessica on the flight over, starts a sexual...

Douglas Messerli. The Walls Come True: an Opera for Spoken Voices.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Douglas Messerli. The Walls Come True: An Opera for Spoken Voices. Littoral Books, 1995.99 pp. Paper: $12.95. Messerli's The Walls Come True, the second part of The Structure of Destruction trilogy, is only an opera in the loosest sense of...

Julieta Campos. Celina or the Cats.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Julieta Campos. Celina or the Cats. Trans. Leland H. Chambers. Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995. 140 pp. Paper: $15.95. This is the third of Cuban-born Mexican writer Julieta Campos's books to be translated into English, after The...

Dorien Ross. Returning to A.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Dorien Ross. Returning to A. City Lights, 1995. 178 pp. Paper: $9.95. This first novel by Dorien Ross is a rare literary event that marks the emergence of a gifted writer. Set in Andalusia and the United States, Returning to A recounts the...

A. Manette Ansay. Read This and Tell Me What It Says.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... A. Manette Ansay. Read This and Tell Me What It Says. Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1995. 142 pp. $22.95. Each of A. Manette Ansay's endearingly expressed stories is filled with burdens. It is up to Ansay's humorously entrenched souls to...

Gary Eberle. Angel Strings.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Gary Eberle. Angel Strings. Coffee House, 1995. 315 pp. Paper: $12.95. Gary Eberle's Angel Strings is a road novel, though less a Kerouacian road narrative than a Fielding-style picaresque adventure through contemporary America. It is both...

David Shields. Remote.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... David Shields. Remote. Knopf, 1996. 206 pp. $22.00. David Shields's imagination has always locked on the idea of remoteness. In his first novel, Heroes (1984), a cerebral sportswriter named Al Biederman longs to possess the urgent vitality...

Mark Kharitonov. Lines of Fate.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Mark Kharitonov. Lines of Fate. Trans. Helena Goscilo. The New Press, 1996. 332 pp. $25.00. Tolstoi's comment about families reminds us of a similar connection between utopias and dystopias. Utopias create happy families based on sameness...

Nick Hornby. High Fidelity.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Nick Hornby. High Fidelity. Riverhead Books, 1995. 326 pp. $21.95. Even punks grow up sooner or later. That's the message of Nick Hornby's hilarious and moving novel about an ordinary bloke who reconciles himself to his extraordinary...

Eileen Drew. The Ivory Crocodile.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Eileen Drew. The Ivory Crocodile. Coffee House, 1996. 288 pp. $21.95. A man I once met in Kenya, the son of missionary parents, told me that there was no place he could call his own. Like Nicole, the narrator of Eileen Drew's fine first...

Diane Schoemperlen. In the Language of Love: a Novel in 100 Chapters.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Diane Schoemperlen. In the Language of Love: A Novel in 100 Chapters. Viking, 1996. 358 pp. $23.95. The 100 small chapters of In the Language of Love are based on the 100 words of the Kent-Rosanoff Word Association Test. Beginning with...

George Saunders. CivilWarLand in bad decline: stories & a novella.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... George Saunders. CivilWarLand in bad decline: stories & a novella. Random, 1996. 179 pp. $22.00. In the future setting of many of these stories, the most unique desire is now commonplace--in fact it would be impossible to have a desire so...

Cydney Chadwick. Oeuvres and Persistent Disturbances.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Cydney Chadwick. Oeuvres and Persistent Disturbances. Texture, 1995.21 and 39 pp. Paper: $5.00 each. Chadwick is the editor of Avec, one of the more consistently interesting journals of creative writing. In these two chapbooks, Chadwick...

Dale Peck. The Law of Enclosures.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Dale Peck. The Law of Enclosures. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. 306 pp. $23.00. I must write a few words about this haunting novel. Although it is, on the surface, a deeply moving, grim work--a work about the loss of youth, the...

Shusaku Endo. Deep River.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Shusaku Endo. Deep River. Trans. Van C. Gessel. New Directions, 1995. 216 pp. Paper: $10.95. Deep River explores isolation, loneliness, and the possibilities of rebirth and reincarnation, or what one character calls the "transport to...

Marcel Cohen. The Peacock Emperor Moth.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Marcel Cohen. The Peacock Emperor Moth. Trans. Cid Corman. Burning Deck, 1995. 106 pp. Paper: $8.00. I find that I keep returning to Burning Deck, the press that dares to publish odd, noncommercial books printed in beautiful typefaces. The...

Kirk Hampton. The Moonhare.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Kirk Hampton. The Moonhare. York, 1996. 222 pp. Paper: $19.95. Austin has more than its share of good science fiction writers: Chad Oliver, Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, William Browning Spencer, and now a new member of the club, Kirk...

Richard Meltzer. The Night (alone).(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Richard Meltzer. The Night (alone). Little, Brown, 1995. 304 pp. $22.95. Richard Meltzer is most famous, or notorious, for The Aesthetics of Rock, a seriocomic exploration of philosophical themes in rock and roll first published in 1970....

Abigail Stone. Recipes from the Dump.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Abigail Stone. Recipes from the Dump. Norton, 1995. 271 pp. $18.00. I read this novel the way I ate leftover stuffing after Thanksgiving--in furtive guilty intervals, marveling at its melded variety of textures and flavors, and never quite...

Arnold Skemer. D.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Arnold Skemer. D. Phyrgian Press, 1995.66 pp. Paper: $6.00. D uses the experience of looking at photographs (family photographs) to meditate upon time. But, of course, it's not just time that's the focus of this meditation: it concerns, as...

Delia Poey, ed. Out of the Mirrored Garden: New Fiction by Latin American Women.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Delia Poey, ed. Out of the Mirrored Garden: New Fiction by Latin American Women. Anchor Books, 1996. 222 pp. Paper: $12.00. Like dangling etudes.... The Latina writers in Delia Poey's pristine anthology, many worldly and accomplished,...

Staszek. Three-Hand Jax and Other Spells.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Staszek. Three-Hand Jax and Other Spells. Permeable Press, 1996. 176 pp. Paper: $9.95. Mellifluent and often possessed writing by someone named Staszek ("Stan" in Polish, we're told) about one gay man's activity and thoughts in the pomo...

Joseph Roth. The Radetzky March.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Joseph Roth. The Radetzky March. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Overlook, 1995. 331 pp. Paper: $13.95. With NATO troops now encamped in Bosnia to enforce the peace plan, it is fitting that a new translation of Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March...

Norman Conquest, ed. By Any Means: An Avant-Pop Anthology.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Norman Conquest, ed. By Any Means: An Avant-Pop Anthology. HOB Press (P.O. Box 180158, Coronado, CA 92178-0158), 1995.80 pp. Paper: $12.00. OK, since everyone seems to be so quick to hop on this Avant-Pop bandwagon, social satirist Norman...

Caradoc Evans. Nothing to Pay.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Caradoc Evans. Nothing to Pay. New Directions, 1995. 237 pp. Paper: $11.95. New Directions's Revived Modern Classics series has largely tended to stick with some of the safer, more marketable choices--authors who are relatively well known,...

Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu, eds. The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu, eds. The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers. Curbstone Press, 1995. xvii + 411 pp. Paper: $17.95. The Other Side of Heaven collects thirty-eight stories and...

Robert Weninger. Framing a Novelist: Arno Schmidt Criticism 1970-1994.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Robert Weninger. Framing a Novelist: Arno Schmidt Criticism 1970-1994. Camden House, 1995. 148 pp. $52.95. In Germany, critical activity on Arno Schmidt (1914-79) has been running at industrial levels for several decades now, comparable to...

Phillip Herring. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Phillip Herring. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. Viking, 1995. 386 pp. $29.95. Djuna Barnes has taken scholars of modernism to their knees, in both senses of the expression. Enough biographical material has circulated to confirm...

Djuna Barnes. Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings.(Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Djuna Barnes. Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings. Edited with an introduction by Douglas Messerli. Sun & Moon, 1995. 241 pp. $29.95. Carolyn Allen. Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss. Indiana Univ. Press, 1996. 142 pp. $35.00;...

Michel Butor. Improvisations on Butor: Transformations of Writing.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Michel Butor. Improvisations on Butor: Transformations of Writing. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. Trans. Elinor S. Miller. Univ. Press of Florida, 1996. 214 pp. $34.95. During the 1980s the French novelist Michel Butor published three books of...

Richard Walsh. Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Richard Walsh. Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1995. 179 pp. No price given. This dissertation, written for Tony Tanner, is a lucid, graceful, thoughtful study (in a distinguished series). It is...

Bin Ramke. Massacre of the Innocents.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Bin Ramke. Massacre of the Innocents. Univ. of Iowa Press, 1994. 83 pp. Paper: $10.95. Bin Ramke is a collagist; inspired by Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell, he creates virtual worlds out of scraps of poetry and images lifted from glossy...

The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965. Edited by Tim Page. Steerforth, 1995. 513 pp. $32.00. Almost forgotten until Gore Vidal "rediscovered" her in the eighties, Dawn Powell is enjoying an enviable posthumous career: most of her novels...

Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner. Our Cancer Year.(Book Review)
June 22, 1996... Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner. Our Cancer Year. Illustrated by Frank Stack. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994. Paper: $17.95. Readers of Harvey Pekar's influential autobiographical comic book, the ironically titled American Splendor, are used...

Reference books.(Column)
June 22, 1996... We rarely review reference books, but several have appeared recently that can be recommended to the student of contemporary literature. (And believe me, after eight years of editing a scholarly journal, I can tell you that critics don't use...

Back in print.(Alexander Theroux's 1981 masterpiece Darconville's Cat )(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Alexander Theroux's 1981 masterpiece Darconville's Cat has just been reissued in paperback (Holt, $16.00). I've exhausted my superlatives on this book--see my introduction to our Theroux/West issue (Spring 1991); it's a Gothic cathedral of a...

Books received.
June 22, 1996... Abiel, Rami. You and No Other. JKSM Publications (Norway), 1996. Paper: no price given. (F) Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Pantheon, 1996. $25.00. (NF) Acker, Kathy. Pussy,...

Nonstop: a synoptic margin to a trilogy. (fiction) (includes brief critical account and interview with Eskelinen by Philip Landon before excerpt of his work)(excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Markku Eskelinen (b. 1959) has published experimental novels, journalism, horror stories, and critical essays. Easily the most iconoclastic figure on the Finnish literary scene, he moves effortlessly between the TV studio, the theater, and the...

Amorfiaana. (includes brief critical account and interview with Jantti by Philip Landon before excerpt of Jantti's work) (fiction)(excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Mariaana Jantti (full name: Gia Ruusu-Mariaana Fieandt-Jantti, b. 1953) has written the most radically experimental work in the Finnish language. Amorfiaana (1986), her punning, hectically free-associating first novel, is oblivious to...

The last of his kind. (includes brief critical account of Kontio and interview with him by Philip Landon before excerpt from his work) (fiction)(excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Kari Kontio (b. 1956) has studied political science, philosophy, theology, and drama and has worked in journalism, television, radio, and the theater. In addition to publishing essays and fiction, he has been a parliamentary candidate, a...

Lucilia illustris. (includes brief critical account of Krohn and interview with her by Philip Landon before excerpt from her work)(fiction)
June 22, 1996... Leena Krohn (b. 1947) is best known for her essays and short stories. Much of her recent work straddles the line between narrative and essay, yielding a sort of cerebral lyricism that focuses on a range of scientific, technological, and...

Run safely, my flock. (includes brief critical account of Paltto and interview with her by Philip Landon before excerpt from her work) (fiction)(excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Kirsti Paltto (b. 1947) is one of the most prolific authors working in Sami, the language of the indigenous minority inhabiting Lapland, or Samiland, in the Russian and Finno-Scandinavian Arctic. She currently chairs the Sami writers, union....

Electric lighting. (fiction) (includes brief critical account and interview with him by Philip Landon before excerpt from his work)(excerpt)
June 22, 1996... Petter Sairanen (b. 1958) studied at the Finnish Theater Academy and currently works for the Finnish Broadcasting Company. He has written screenplays and fiction, and his play Maailmasta ei ole mitaan hyotya (The World Is Useless) received its...