These two 8“ x 11“ album books are best taken as a combined dose of difficult reality and escapist fantasy. Vertigo (a text-and-picture combination) demolishes the traditional city guide that comforted earlier generations;... Read More
In 1865, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators were captured, tried, and executed. Of course, such a conspiracy, created by a civil war, would not die so easily. Ulysses S. Grant, the main... Read More
These delicate poems, charged with a sense of serenity that seems incredible to modern sensibilities, cast images of an almost mythic world—formal and austere, yet infused with the banked passion of “red pomegranate wine.”... Read More
In this, Liu’s fourth book of poems, the evidence is the minutiae and banalities that comprise everyday lives; each moment is made extraordinary in its realness, both brutal and beautiful. “Sometimes blood. / Or bruise or death you... Read More
“The violin is my life, but the viola my destiny,” says Paganini upon receiving the infamous Destiny viola, or the Voice of Manush. This second book of the “Destiny Suite,” a grand mythology of classical music, chronicles the... Read More
The art of prevarication is alive and well. In Here Lies, the title of which comes from first-class liar Dorothy Parker, that art is taken to a new level. In this collection of twenty-one short stories, “every story either features the... Read More
In Greek mythology, the Hesperides were the daughters of Atlas, who guarded a golden-apple-producing tree of life. Zeus and Hera received the tree as a wedding present and planted it in a beautiful garden protected by a dragon.... Read More
The night was dark, the village small. The young men jostled each other as they made their way into the Shinto shrine, pressing together so tightly that the entire mass of humanity hovered a few feet above the ground. The Festival of... Read More