The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
July/August 2007
Books
Poetry: Mister I Think
by James O'ConnorBooks
Herbert, who won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1995, is a titan of not only Polish poetry, but of twentieth-century European poetry. His celebrated alter ego, Mr. Cogito, ranks as the one of the most original characters in modern poetry.
Fiction: Clap Trap
by Alexander ZaitchikBooks
Brook, who is in his mid-20s, paints a picture of his generation in which the defining dichotomy is the sad choice between toil in saintly penury and pulling six-figures at some corporate monster.
Nonfiction: The Poetics of Sociability
by Benjamin TrippBooks
Don’t Ever Get Famous follows the publication of Daniel Kane’s earlier book of essays, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960’s with a further analysis of the second-generation ‘New York School’ in avant-garde poetry.
Fiction: Honeymoon Humiliation
by John G. Rodwan Jr.Books
While Ian McEwan puts two characters, newlyweds Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, at the center of On Chesil Beach, their times concern him as much as their individual experiences.
Nonfiction: East of Classic
by Naomi KaravaniBooks
The recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in the mid-nineteenth century could best be described as disorienting.
Nonfiction: The Taxonomy of Melancholy
by Ben GoreBooks
Horowitz and Wakefield trace the diagnosis of depression, and its distinction from sadness, back as far as Hippocrates, through Robert Burton, and on to the modern day.
Fiction: Lyrics of the Past
by Jim FeastBooks
Two recent books, Night by Joanna Gunderson and The Company I Keep by Jordan Zinovich, share a peculiar affinity. They both feature lyrical dramas that evoke valued figures from the past, bringing them to life powerfully but in obliterated form.
Scenes from the End of the World
by Laura StokesBooks
This has been a good year for the literary-minded eschatologist.
Jon Savage with Karen Rester
by Karen ResterBooks
Savage, a well-known music critic in the UK and author of England’s Dreaming, a definitive history of British punk, offers strong theories about how the concept of adolescence emerged after WWII as a stage independent of childhood.
To Live in a Culture
by Nora GriffinBooks
A portrait emerges from a collage of one-liners and innuendoes of the author as a young intellectual with bohemian leanings.
