The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
June 2007
Books
mamapalooza
Marjorie Tesser with Cassandra Neyenesch
by Cassandra Neyenesch
Books
Last year I participated in a festival called Mamapalooza, and this year one of my stories was published in its journal, The Mom Egg. Both times, I felt a little guilty, like I was pulling the old “I pushed a person out of my body” card just to get a gig.
Fiction: Lyrically Feral
by Adrian JiménezBooks
“I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.”
Nonfiction: Peace Long Ago
by Naomi KaravaniBooks
In the twelfth century, the time of Jihadis and Crusaders, there was a church built on the island of Sicily. It was constructed for the Norman king, Roger II. The artwork on the interior of the Cappella Palatina was unparalleled in the Mediterranean of its time, in ingenuity of form and symbolism and in its melding of styles, including Islamic and Byzantine.
Nonfiction: Looking for Utopia
by Erica WetterBooks
Living in a city—where poverty is juxtaposed with wealth; trash and concrete abound; and it’s not unusual to see people arguing, crying, or urinating in public—it’s hard not to feel an occasional apocalyptic despair.
Nonfiction: No Pain, No Game(space) by Laura Stokes
by Laura StokesBooks
Before Gamer Theory, there was GAM3R 7H30RY, McKenzie Wark’s online experiment which reverses the traditional publishing algorithm: public scrutiny before publication.
Nonfiction: Hitchens in Love
by John G. Rodwan Jr.Books
The book revisits ideas, issues and incidents he addresses in other works. His polemic is the culmination of a career spent arguing against weak-mindedness, which religious belief is by definition. Beyond being disputatious, however, Hitchens does offer an alternative to faith, something he has also advocated elsewhere: in a word, literature.
Literature: Wordplay
by Anna WainwrightBooks
In “How to Think Like Leonardo Da’vinci,” a word “drawing” from Johannah Rodgers’s new book Sentences, the author speaks of “fitting one’s life to a narrative.” On a first reading, Sentences seems essentially narrative—less.
