New England Review of Books

boston, mass. // launched 2016 // the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain

amplifying criticism, commentary and literary news // updates mon-fri
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Items of note this quarter:
misleading Plath cover
more on Sizemore
book that inspired Dune
rap lyrics database
5 whoa ladies of 19th-cent lit
from Images of the Fixed Stars
some favorite typefaces
Vladislav Surkov's alt-Russia
books to change liberal minds
the first issue of Vogue
Latino art on Google
Lines + Stars broadsides
Ashbery's indispensable poems
Mumbai's 4-month poetry school
a guide to poetic Boston
Blood, Sweat and Pixels
Da Vinci's notebooks online
on hating fantasy maps
on Guy Davenport's prose
remembering Ruth Stone
Mondo 2000 returns
"Once again our paths cross."
MAD magazine look-alikes
Animated science book covers
A new Reichstag fire
sonnets are fascism
I don't feel it is a good fit
Science reveals hidden ms
About Literary North
GoT in Africa
Leonardo's diary now public
Authors who can go f*** off
Breaking news as limericks
#trumpwriteshallmarkcards
A prank on predatory journals
/r/delusionalauthors
Beware of nominalizations!
On POC mentorship
Clancy Sigal, 1926-2017
Men try neuter pen names
Magical transcribers wanted
The Constitution, annotated
Lethem on higher cribbing
In the infinite Ikia
Surviving a residency
A chat with Him Woodring
Virgil Finlay, dark and light
The benefits of doubt
Schiele's angst made sense
Back to Treasure Island
Revelations from Plath letters
Sara Ranchouse book art
Bad robot poetry
Outlook Springs rejects well

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Reviews and
Criticism
08.22.17: "Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity." link>>
08.03.17: Jim Alison on Catherine Sinclair's 1839 novel, Holiday House. link>>
08.02.17: "I’m mistrustful of a book that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited entirely by children." link>>
08.01.17: Draw Your Weapons looks at human darkness while celebrating how love, art and connectedness nourish and redeem the spirit. link>>
07.31.17: A new bio of Mahmoud Abbas aims for objectivity amid the contending perspectives of Middle Eastern politics. link>>
07.28.17: A round-up of recent recommended fiction from the Balkans. link>>
07.27.17: "I loved this book end to end and I am using my position as Deputy Commander of the NPR Nerd Army to instruct all of you to read it immediately." link>>
07.26.17: Wu He wrote Remains of Life to provide a deep and depoliticized telling of Taiwan's colonial history. link>>
07.25.17: In Hum If You Don’t Know the Words, a young girl in apartheid South Africa co-narrates with a maid named Beauty. link>>
07.24.17: Dorian Stuber reviews The Farm in the Green Mountains, Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer’s memoir of exile during WWII. link>>
07.21.17: Alexandra Kulik delves into the delightfully horrible japes of Joe Green's poetry. link>>
07.20.17: "The heartbreak of Ben Mazer’s February Poems seems overwhelming." link>>
07.19.17: "Range finds the poetic in the colloquial, the past in the present, the transcendent in the immanent." link>>
07.18.17: A new biography of John Ashbery explains the origin of his taste for ambiguity. link>>
07.17.17: Nikki Wallschlaeger’s sonnets are "cramped structures, passageways through a larger space." link>>
07.14.17: Anjali Pandey’s study of linguistic exhibitionism in fiction speaks to the future of post-global multilingualism. link>>
07.13.17: "Like many novels recently penned by North African writers, Tunisian Yankee revisits the awakening of national pride and its brutal repression." link>>
07.12.17: The Shark Club by Ann Kidd Taylor is a summertime beach read with a brain. link>>
07.11.17: At Jehat, a reflection on fragmentation in contemporary Moroccan youth poetry. link>>
07.10.17: Peter Brannen's timely new book tells of the effort to understand the mass extinctions in Earth's history. link>>
07.06.17: It takes guts for a young author to follow ordinary people in the ordinary world in which we actually live. link>>
07.06.17: Tess Taylor reviews Randall Munn's Proprietary for All Things Considered. link>>
07.05.17: Cassandra Nelson finds that, in his new novel, Coetzee has no wisdom to convey. link>>
07.04.17: "Nothing happens in the novel of Khalid Lyamlahy. Absolutely nothing." link>>
07.03.17: A retrospective review of Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish and Soraya: Sonnets by Anis Shivani. link>>
06.30.17: The TLS reprints an edited version of a review by J.R.R. Tolkien of Hali Meidenhad, first published in 1923. link>>
06.29.17: The City Always Wins is an intermittently revealing literary portrait of Cairo, but fails as imaginative fiction. link>>
06.28.17: A House Among the Trees chronicles the legacy of a kids' book author modeled loosely after Maurice Sendak. link>>
06.27.17: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows incorporates elements of rom-com, mystery, and family saga, with plenty of jokes that aren’t really jokes. link>>
06.26.17: Five great things about Senator Al Franken’s memoir, Giant of the Senate. link>>
06.23.17: Thea Hawlin on Michèle Roberts on the “mind and millinery” books of “silly lady novelists.” link>>
06.22.17: The adolescent hero of Nick White’s debut novel confronts repressed memories and the horrors of a Gothic summer camp in the Deep South. link>>
06.21.17: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews two works of history for The Onion's AV Club. link>>
Excerpts, Features
and Interviews
08.04.17: Tor.com offers geologic reasons for the messed-up mountains of Middle-earth. link>>
08.03.17:"While a poem must have social intelligence, poetry needs weird subjectivity." link>>
08.02.17: Samuel Wright Fairbanks treats with secret syntax and butterfly knives in these two new poems. link>>
08.01.17: Geoff Ryman on the autochthonous rise of African speculative fiction. link>>
07.31.17: Vlad Savich talks with Kenyatta JP Garcia, author of Slow Living and They Say. link>>
07.28.17: A video lecture by poet and translator A.E. Stallings on the writing of poetry. link>>
07.27.17: Hyphen Magazine presents a short story by Mai Wang, about a young Chinese woman living in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing. link>>
07.26.17: The Rumpus talks with Meghan Lamb, whose new book was published by feminist press Birds of Lace. link>>
07.25.17: If David Mayhew wants to argue that Congress is the messiest of our governing institutions, who among us would think to disagree? link>>
07.24.17: Remembering Bill Knott, and reappraising his uncanny, crabbed, surreal poetry. link>>
07.21.17: "… we will taste each other’s ashes, you said"; a haunting lyric by Joanna C. Valente of Yes, Poetry. link>>
07.20.17: "The jigsaw of my body didn't fit"; a new poem from translator, writer and educator Sara Daniele Rivera. link>>
07.19.17: A poem by Russell Bennetts eulogizes the Grenfell Tower tragedy. link>>
07.18.17: "Mice, it turns out, have excellent taste in books." link>>
07.17.17: A new bio by Laura Dassow Walls challenges the idea of Thoreau as a slacker. link>>
07.14.17: Robert Archambeau considers the use of letters of the alphabet in poetry. link>>
07.13.17: "…dispensing honours, correlating plans… "; a poem by Ben Mazer. link>>
07.12.17: The editors of sixteen American lit mags tell Anis Shivani how they are surviving our era of publishing disruption. link>>
07.11.17: "I imagine women flying around all over Delhi on magic carpets to avoid unsafe public transport," said the poet. link>>
07.10.17: Patrick Chamoiseau imagines a world in which creolization mitigates the inhumanity of globalization. link>>
07.07.17: An ongoing critical look at The Chronicles of Narnia, by the folks at Faithless Feminist. link>>
07.06.17: In an experimental essay hosted by Partisan Hotel, Mary Margaret Rinebold links art writing, book fairs and the trap of good taste. link>>
07.05.17: A podcast interview with Joanna C. Valente, author of Marys of the Sea and other poetic feats of indie lit. link>>
07.04.17: Ryan Ruby met with Natasha Perova in her Moscow apartment to discuss translation, Russian writing since perestroika, and other issues. link>>
07.03.17: "Body, Undeformed", a poem by Jayce Russell, poetry editor of Outlook Springs. link>>
06.30.17: Massachusetts poets Susan Edwards Richmond and David Davis discuss their advocacy of plein air poetry. link>>
06.29.17: Rob McLennan does twelve (or twenty) questions with poet Elaine Feeney. link>>
06.28.17: Jon Maniscalco talks with novelist Michael Allan Scott about the influences, personal and artistic, on his work. link>>
06.27.17: A PBS profile of Egyptian-American poet Yahia Lababidi and his new book of aphorisms. link>>
06.26.17: How Chris Herron overcame blindness and started an audiobook show for new sci-fi and fantasy. link>>
06.23.17: Qais Akbar Omar talks with AGNI about writing to cope with memories of war. link>>
06.22.17: Three poems from Uttaran Das Gupta’s forthcoming book Visceral Metropolis. link>>
06.21.17: Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, listed by the Hay Festival as among the most promising African writers under 40, has a new story in Brittle Paper. link>>
New Books and
Literary News
09.20.17: Venezuelan poet Yolanda Pantin has been awarded the American Poetry Award from Casa de América. link>>
08.09.17: This ebook of essays contains everything Scott Woods has publicly written and published about Prince. link>>
08.04.17: Sheikh Zayed Book Award receives over 700 nominations from authors all across the Arab world. link>>
08.03.17: Join contributors and editors of The Charles River Journal in Boston for tonight's boozy wayzgoose reading. link>>
08.02.17: The Writers’ Room of Boston has announced the winners of their Immigrant Voices Essay Contest. link>>
08.01.17: The Digital Critic airs views on the future of literature in an age of social media, the decline of print, and the commodification of online attention. link>>
07.31.17: The developers of the Trubadour platform and mobile app aim to increase engagement and interest in poetry. link>>
07.28.17: Rainmaker critic Michiko Kakutani is parting ways with The New York Times. link>>
07.27.17: Charlie English's account of the book smugglers of Timbuktu is equal parts reportage, history and romance. link>>
07.26.17: Namara Smith plumbs the depths of Patricia Lockwood's memoir, Priestdaddy. link>>
07.25.17: Writer and translator Adeeba Shahid Talukder has been named winner of the 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize. link>>
07.24.17: The latest update in Merkur's series on sexism at creative writing programs in German universities. link>>
07.21.17: Libertarian and conservative reviewers are waging an ad hominem campaign against a historian. link>>
07.20.17: A keynote by Andrew Wylie will open THE MARKETS conference at the 2017 Frankfurter Buchmesse. link>>
07.19.17: Australian Book Review releases shortlist for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. link>>
07.18.17: The summer issue of Banipal is focused on works longlisted for the most prestigious prize in Arabic fiction. link>>
07.17.17: Eyal Sagui Bizawe sees signs that Israelis, at long last, are beginning to read Arabic lit in Hebrew translation. link>>
07.14.17: "The question isn’t, 'Is print dead?' but rather: What should print do to distinguish itself from digital?" link>>
07.13.17: New report shows that the EU's Creative Europe cultural funding program has to finance around €2.8m of publishing projects in the UK. link>>
07.12.17: Arsalan Fasihi asserts that Iran’s literary world suffers from bad translations. link>>
07.11.17: Mexico's Milenio talks with Goncourt-winning poet Abdellatif Laâbi, now living in exile in Morocco. link>>
07.10.17: Cameron Neylon has an analysis of the collective funding model of the Open Library of Humanities. link>>
07.07.17: Bushra al-Fadil of Sudan is the first Arab and the oldest recipient this far to win the Caine Prize for African writing. link>>
07.06.17: The Principle of Unrest by Brian Massumi is available free as a PDF download from Open Humanities Press. link>>
07.05.17: Introducing Intercostal, a new literary magazine blending poetry, criticism and commentary, based in Salamanca. link>>
07.04.17: Jack Collom, pioneer of eco-poetics and adjunct professor at Naropa, has died. link>>
07.03.17: The political editor of the largest daily newspaper in Zimbabwe has published a collection of poetry. link>>
06.30.17: The mission of Seagull Books in Kolkata, India, is to publish translated writing from around the world. link>>
06.29.17: Yale digital humanist creates an audiovisual collage showcasing objects related to John Ashbery’s poetry. link>>
06.28.17: Seattle’s civic poet has created a living digital poetic map of her city. link>>
06.27.17: Is StoryCorps running an anti-union campaign? link>>
06.26.17: Clayton Childress tells what goes on behind the scenes of a novel. link>>
06.23.17: Galway residents share memories of beloved Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. link>>
06.22.17: This week sees the release of an anthology of poetry written by people who have lived, or are living, as refugees or asylum seekers in Ireland. link>>
06.21.17: Anita Sivakumaran’s debut novel narrates the story of the unstoppable rise of a female politician from student to actress and then to chief minister. link>>

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