Two Cosmopolitan Collections

Two Cosmopolitan Collections

Essay Collections in a Global Time By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor In the American Sixties, a writer’s “sense of place” usually referred to regionalism and immediately brought to mind Faulkner, Cather, and Frost. For English writers, the phrase suggested colonial displacements, such as E.M. Forster’s India or Joseph Conrad’s Congo.  Since then, however, with…

Eye on the Indies

Eye on the Indies

A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Reviews Editor AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press, 2018). 320pp, paper, $16.00.  “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society…

Review: Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction

Review: Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction

Traditional vs. Modernist approaches, Fine vs. Plain prose styles By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor LIVING BY FICTION by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 192 pages. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our assumptions have…

Book Review: Know Thyself

Book Review: Know Thyself

“A poet writes to continue asking questions” By Ruth Lepson, poet-in-residence at New England Conservatory of Music It takes nerve to write homophonic renderings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet that’s exactly what Joyce Peseroff has done in one section of her well-crafted, complex recent book of poems: Like a granite island quarried to oblivion, her husband’s memory…