BY DALLAS WOODBURN

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. She’s received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

Check back in a few weeks for an interview with the author!

A …MORE

BY CHIDELIA EDOCHIE, NONFICTION EDITOR

Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and is a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She is the winner of PEN International’s 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize, and in 2006 her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home. She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi. Below is a review of the new collection, and you can click here for 5 Questions with the author.

The eleven short stories of News from Home cross oceans from Nigeria to America to the UK. This triad of strongly …MORE

by Ruth Joynton

Two things interested me about Allison Titus.

The title of her book, Sum of Every Lost Ship, drew my attention first. Since diving in Lake Huron last summer with its remarkable collection of shipwrecks, anything to do with the sunken objects of this world fascinates me. Any mention of water will at least make me pause and look back. There’s a woman on the white cover, dressed in what seems to be Nineteenth Century fashion, and she’s speaking. But the speech balloon to the right of her body doesn’t contain words, rather whales, whale bones, and above the water, a vessel. Which makes sense once you read the poems in Sum of Every Lost Ship. Someone is speaking in the work, or—more accurately—someones. In this debut collection, Titus gathers a …MORE

BY ANTHONY COOK, Editor-in-Chief

I must make a disclosure right up front: I’m a huge fan of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s. I’ve been hooked ever since reading her fantastic short story, “The Smallest Man in the World,” which later appeared in her first book, Women and Other Animals. So, I read her newest book, American Salvage, with high expectations. I wasn’t let down.

American Salvage is a collection of 14 stories set in small town and rural Michigan. Though not formally linked, they share a strong sense of place and a cast of down-and-out characters, all wrapped up in Campbell’s energetic, lively prose.

Campbell presents Michigan as a place of beautiful lakes and glistening snow, but also of propane tanks, rusted El Caminos, old foundries, and salvage yards. This is done with a deft touch; it’s never heavy-handed and rarely draws attention …MORE

BY CHRISTOPHER FELICIANO ARNOLD

The narrator of Rawi Hage’s second novel is a nameless immigrant from a nameless war-torn country, struggling to survive in Montreal, “this city with its case of chronic snow.” The story opens shortly after his botched attempt to hang himself in a city park. This failed suicide results in court mandated therapy sessions with a naïve young counselor named Genevieve. What follows is a bleak, existentialist survival tale—the 21st century spawn of Dostoevsky and Kafka, replete with crime, drugs, and sex.

Born in Beirut, Hage lived through nine years of Lebanese civil war before immigrating to Canada in 1992. His debut novel De Niro’s Game, winner of the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, told the story of two young men on the ravaged streets of Beirut. In Cockroach, Hage fixes his gaze on the exile experience, delivering …MORE

BY M. LYNX QUALEY

At the end of Rafik Schami’s sprawling The Dark Side of Love, recently released in English, the author worries about how Western colonialist narratives may have shaped and colored his work.

“Again and again,” Schami writes in the book’s final, memoir-like pages, “I had been led astray by colonialist ideas of us, which whether well-intentioned or not ultimately offered misinformation.”

The novel, which cost Schami 40 years and a library of more than 200 books, numerous magazines, and boxes of archival materials, was the work of a heart, he says, fixed in his native Damascus. However, the novel—which was written in his adopted German—resembles Western literature far more than contemporary Arab work. The Dark Side of Love spans a blood-feud-thwarted love affair and a murder-mystery, and is told in largely realist style. …MORE

BY STEELE CAMPBELL

Peter Campion’s new book of poems, The Lions, articulates both the private intimacies of life and a robust involvement with the natural and political world. He intensifies the individuality of his first book, Other People, also published by The University of Chicago (2005), to show how the personal is inescapably public. To traverse from the personal to the public, Campion establishes both intimacy and grandeur. The collection begins by intoning the dual involvement:

It happens in our ignorance.
Fringing the steep calderas and
sinkholes
                  the blacktail deer descend.
Trembling. All systems on alert.

Then, in short declarative statements he describes the natural world descending into the technological to gaze “however long / Then tense. Then pulse out through the air / smelling of buckwheat and water.” Reminiscent of Lowell, The Lions contrasts two usually separate spheres utilizing the terminology of the technological to …MORE

BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

There are at least three voices at work in Brent Goodman’s the brother swimming beneath me.  There is the voice of the lens: poems rich in sight-detail that move as a cycle of photographs before the reader, often with the same subject shot from several angles. “The Sunarban Swampland Tiger swims up to 2 miles a day. A diver captures how outstretched paws shape efficient paddles. The narrator explains how big cats swim the same way they walk, walk the way they swim, chins skimming water.”

There is Goodman’s sonnet voice: rambunctious, funny, full of old jazz: “Cans cranked, I love to listen past the studio tricks/ and catch a hint of any discarded ghost line/ mistakenly laid down when a mic bleeds through./ First thought, best thought? Cue take two.” Though …MORE

BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

As a lover of Rilke, I remember reading Duino Elegies for the first time, nineteen years old, how one thick poem could sustain me for days.  It was proof that exhaustion is not always the reader’s enemy: when done right, it even satisfies.  It seemed impossible to read a book of Rilke’s in a very short amount of time (have I read all of his work yet?) and really understand it.  Still the work sustained me, and kept me coming back.  Jessica Garratt’s poems in her first book, Fire Pond, are crafted differently but stem from the same root of a good-willed doubting look at the world.  They also satisfy.

For a cerebral, philosophically-minded poet, Garratt is honest.  This is what invites the reader back—the no bullshit policy of her poems.  The opening piece “Abstract” starts straight: …MORE