The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2008

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2008

Editor's note.
June 22, 2008... This issue of the Review is an unapologetic imitation of (and homage to) James Laughlin of New Directions. For many years, Laughlin published a New Directions anthology that largely consisted of his writers, oftentimes selections of forthcoming...

From The Mirror in the Well.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming September 2008 1 The girl and her lover meet for the first time at a pub downtown. They had arranged this meeting over the telephone the week before and they share a liter of beer and soon the girl is high from the alcohol...

From Prairie Style.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming September 2008 DOWNSTATE To have the same sound, to be called by the same name. Location's what you come to; it's the low point, it usually repeats. To me, any value is a location to be reckoned with; I would be...

From Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming September 2008 I The name is Mrs Unguentine. I was not the one born with it, he was. We were married by telephone when the great cable was laid across the ocean floor well before the weather turned so foul; it was the thing...

From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming October 2008 1 September 11, rue Toullier So, this is where people come in order to live, I would have rather thought: to die. I have been out. I have seen: hospitals. I saw a man who tottered and collapsed. People...

From Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming October 2008 In the exclusive residential district on the edge of the city, the photographer Anton Diabelli and his sister Johanna lived in an elegant house with a spacious park-like garden that stretched to the nearby...

From The One Marvelous Thing.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming November 2008 The Wild Child In those years when I bounded about on all fours and on my elbows fled those I feared; when, in those lucent days I scaled trees fast as a cat and sailed the treetops as the squirrels do,...

From The Bathroom.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming November 2008 1. When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it; no, I would pass some pleasant hours there, meditating in the bathtub, sometimes dressed, other times naked. Edmondsson,...

From Talking out of School.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming December 2008 I. Threads 1. The first teacher I ever met caught me in perhaps the most unflattering moment of my life--slimy, blood-streaked, bruised, and shrieking. A desiccating tube streams from belly to knees. I...

From A Nest of Ninnies.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming December 2008 Chapter 1 Alice was tired. Languid, fretful, she turned to stare into her own eyes in the mirror above the mantelpiece before she spoke. "I dislike being fifty miles from a great city. I don't know how...

From Pigeon Post.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming December 2008 I'm looking out the window: black, skeletal trees. White doves, no, gray pigeons among the branches, flying, roosting, feeding, ho-hum. A ray of sunshine... On the wall enclosing the vast garden, a grand estate,...

From Dust.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming January 2009 Petersburg in the Margins Snapshots turn the eye into a curious animal. To its pupil, Petersburg arises effortlessly as a collection of postcards in unstable reflections of rumors about its fate. It's...

From Anonymous Celebrity.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming March 2009 THE LAST CHANCE I HAVE IN LIFE IS TO TRANSFORM MYSELF INTO A LEGEND. WITHOUT THIS, I'M GOING TO SUFFER THE PERMANENT ANGUISH OF THE ANONYMOUS. It's delicious not to be ordinary. Not to be a common man. Not...

From Hoppla! 1 2 3.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming April 2009 Und an diesem Mittag wird es still sein am Hafen Wenn man fragt, wer wohl sterben muss. Und dann werden Sie mich sagen horen: Alle! Und wenn dann der Kopf fallt, sag ich: Hoppla! In that...

From News from the Empire.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming April 2009 Bouchout Castle, 1927 I am Marie Charlotte of Belgium, Empress of Mexico and of America. I am Marie Charlotte Amelie, cousin of the Queen of England, Grand Magister of the Cross of Saint Charles, and Vicereine of...

From encounters with Samuel Beckett.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming April 2009 October 24, 1968 I buzz the intercom to his apartment. He tells me to come up. As I step out of the elevator, I almost bump into him. He has been waiting for me in the hallway. We enter his study. I sit down on a...

From Western.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming September 2009 On the Porch 1 Give him any name you want, this thirty-year-old in the checkered shirt who, depending on what is certainly the most makeshift apparatus, rocks back and forth under the roof of the porch...

From Jerusalem.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2008... forthcoming September 2010 Chapter 1 Ernst & Mylia 1 Ernst Spengler was alone in his attic apartment, ready to throw himself out the already open window when, suddenly, the telephone rang. Once, twice, three times, four,...

Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho. A Game of War.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho. A Game of War. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Atlas Press, 2007. 156 pp. Cloth: 20.00 [pounds sterling]. Guy Debord, whose argument for the centrality of play, of drift, in everyday life led French students...

Micheline Aharonian Marcom. Draining the Sea.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Micheline Aharonian Marcom. Draining the Sea. Riverhead Books, 2008. 339 pp. Cloth: $26.95. In her third novel, Draining the Sea, Marcom constructs a bizarre relationship between an American man, the progeny of genocide survivors, and...

Christine Montalbetti. Petits Dejeuners avec quelques ecrivains celebres.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Christine Montalbetti. Petits Dejeuners avec quelques ecrivains celebres. POL, 2008. 215 pp. Paper: 17.00 [euro]. Readers hoping to feast upon tasty morsels of literary gossip in these "breakfasts with a few famous writers" will undoubtedly...

Yuri Druzhnikov. Pushkin's Second Wife and Other Micronovels.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Yuri Druzhnikov. Pushkin's Second Wife and Other Micronovels. Trans. Thomas Moore. Peter Owen, 2008. 344 pp. Cloth: $22.00. Certainly one of the most heroic counterforce voices raised during the long cultural winter of the old Soviet Union...

Zachary Mason. The Lost Books of the Odyssey.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Zachary Mason. The Lost Books of the Odyssey. Starcherone Books, 2007. 228 pp. Paper: $16.00. It's a bold author who attempts to re-imagine Homer, and a brave translator who allows the possibility that his source text may be "essentially...

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Insect Dreams.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Insect Dreams. Rain Mountain Press, 2007. 64 pp. Paper: $13.00. Weaving lush, lyric prose with historical research, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson's novella Insect Dreams follows the noted seventeenth-century...

Imre Kertesz. Detective Story.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Imre Kertesz. Detective Story. Trans. Tim Wilkinson. Knopf, 2008. 128 pp. Cloth: $21.00. Until recently, Kertesz has plied his craft underground, little known even in his native Hungary. Fortunately, his work did not go altogether...

Renee Gladman. Newcomer Can't Swim.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Renee Gladman. Newcomer Can't Swim. Kelsey Street Press, 2007. 120 pp. Paper: $16.95. The events in Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim take place in the present tense and without a primary cohesive narrative frame or voice. Caught in a...

Alexander Kluge. Cinema Stories.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Alexander Kluge. Cinema Stories. Trans. Martin Brady and Helen Hughes. New Directions, 2007. 111 pp. Paper: $11.95. Neue Deutsche Film godfather Alexander Kluge has repeatedly stated that he makes no distinction between the varied pursuits...

Debra Di Blasi. The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Debra Di Blasi. The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions. FC2, 2007. 209 pp. Paper: $19.95. In her latest book, Di Blasi's frustration with storytelling is palpable. Her previous works were too often nonshocking things, full of "edgy" sexual...

Toby Olson. Tampico: A Novel.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Toby Olson. Tampico: A Novel. University of Texas Press, 2008. 262 pp. Cloth: $24.95. In this novel, Olson appropriates the tradition of the calaveras: literally "skulls" and by extension death figures supposed to communicate with the...

Dinty W. Moore. Between Panic & Desire.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Dinty W. Moore. Between Panic & Desire. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 140 pp. Cloth: $24.95. What can be said about a youth whose only ambition is to smoke as much pot as humanly possible? Quite a bit, it turns out, in the case of...

Steven Millhauser. Dangerous Laughter.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Steven Millhauser. Dangerous Laughter. Knopf, 2008. 244 pp. Cloth: $24.00. Steven Millhauser is a dangerous man. He sees things in our society that no one else sees but that everyone feels--from them he builds worlds. He writes down these...

James Lewelling. Tortoise.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... James Lewelling. Tortoise. Calamari Press, 2008. 124 pp. Paper: $14.00. An unnamed narrator flies home, stopping overnight in a hotel, en route to visit his dying father who claims to want to tell him something. While this could be the...

Alexandra Chasin. Kissed By.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Alexandra Chasin. Kissed By. FC2, 2007. 174 pp. Paper: $17.95. Some readers will agree with a blurb on the back of Kissed By that labels Alexandra Chasin's debut work of fiction "experimental." It's not as if experimental writers can be...

Bernd Lichtenberg, Kathrin Roggla, and Kristin Schnider. Three Contemporary German-Language Fiction Writers: Lichtenberg, Roggla, Schnider.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Bernd Lichtenberg, Kathrin Roggla, and Kristin Schnider. Three Contemporary German-Language Fiction Writers: Lichtenberg, Roggla, Schnider. Trans. Zaia Alexander, William Martin and Kristen Schnider. Green Integer, 2007. 91 pp. Paper: $11.95....

Aaron Kunin. The Mandarin: A Novel.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Aaron Kunin. The Mandarin: A Novel. Fence Books, 2008. 256 pp. Paper: $19.95. This is the first novel by the poet Aaron Kunin and it consists of 57 narrative segments introduced by a "Synopsis," which summarizes a number of the volumes...

Roberto Bolano. Nazi Literature in the Americas.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Roberto Bolano. Nazi Literature in the Americas. Trans. Chris Andrews. New Directions, 2008. 227 pp. Cloth: $23.95. It's no surprise that Jorge Luis Borges is among the numerous literary cameos featured in Robert Bolano's Nazi Literature in...

Nathaniel Mackey. Bass Cathedral.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Nathaniel Mackey. Bass Cathedral. New Directions, 2008. 183 pp. Paper: $16.95. National Book Award-winning poet Mackey returns to fiction in the fourth installment of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, a series of...

Len Jenkin. N Judah.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Len Jenkin. N Judah. Green Integer, 2007. 312 pp. Paper: $12.95. Known mostly for his work as a playwright (Dark Ride and American Notes), Len Jenkin published his first novel in 1986, New Jerusalem (Sun & Moon Press). N Judah starts in San...

Jeffrey DeShell. The Trouble with Being Born.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Jeffrey DeShell. The Trouble with Being Born. FC2, 2008. 209 pp. Paper: $18.00. In his fourth book DeShell tackles common enough subjects: the lives of his parents. It is in his original method of telling their stories, however, that this...

Tobias Wolff. Our Story Begins.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Tobias Wolff. Our Story Begins. Knopf, 2008.400 pp. Cloth: $26.95. If you are a long-time fan of Tobias Wolff's work, and are excited about his first volume of short fiction since The Night in Question (1996), please discard all but one...

Elizabeth Hertley Winthrop.(December)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Elizabeth Hertley Winthrop. December. Knopf, 2008. 250 pp. Cloth: $23.95. I am interested in one-word titles. I want to know what the word means. Here is the narrator of December viewing her father: "Wilson got his arm deep in the twisted...

Frank O'Hara. Selected Poems.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Frank O'Hara. Selected Poems. Ed. Mark Ford. Knopf, 2008.265 pp. Cloth: $30.00. Gracious, charming, witty, sassy, spontaneous, irreverent, joyful, campy, insouciant--Frank O'Hara's poetry always brings to mind the best sort of adjectives,...

Books received.
June 22, 2008... Ackers, Deborah S. and Bagader, Abubaker A. (Ed) Oranges in the Sun: Short Stories from the Arabian Gulf. Lynne Rienner, 2008. $17.95 Adams, Poppy. The Sister. Knopf, 2008. $23.95. Agaoglu, Adalet. Summer's End. Trans. Figen Bingul....