Fiction. A first novel from a writer whose mentors include Paula Gunn Allen, Jon Wagner, Benjamin Weissman and Elizabeth Treadwell. Sisters Madeleine and Jean and Paula are all over the map. "Jean would've kept going to therapy. There were many reasons why she couldn't. For one, the etiquette was as difficult as at a fancy restaurant or dinner at a wealthy friend's house in high school." Elsewhere, her writing has been described as "startling in the immediacy of its language" - Paul Tullis, commenting on her account of a Gen-X party, published in the nonfiction anthology, Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writing from the Golden State.

SPOTS AND TROUBLESPOTS

Literature & Fiction

Treadwell, Carol

Contemporary

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

Fiction. A collection of thirty-five vignettes from new author Ken McCullough of Seismicity Editions, a project of the Otis College of Art and Design. McCullough's selections span various time periods and locations to present a wide-ranging cast of characters.I rose from a grove of scrub oak, at the thick of the planet, on a point of land, in a cove near Bath, Maine. It was the last leg of August. I thought the tent was burning—just the woodsmoke in my clothes. I could hear the morning tide.

Left Hand

McCullough, Ken

Poetry. Translated from the French by Guy Bennett. ESPITALLIER'S THEOREM, by noted French poet Jean-Michel Espitallier, is an award-winning, adventuresome volume first published in 2003 by Flammarion in Paris. This exploded book, full of lists and enumerations, is composed of sections and fragmented poems that continue to appear throughout the 160 page volume in new relationships and permutations. Beginning as a faux dialogue between a young man and a world famous, notoriously reclusive philosopher, ESPITALLIER'S THEOREM touches on the perennial, insoluble problems or "theorems" that have befuddled humanity for centuries. Language and the way language may be manipulated to finally mean nothing is at the heart of this beguiling book's concern.

Espitallier's Theorem

Espitallier, Jean-Michel

Essays & Correspondence

Poetry. A REVIEW OF TWO WORLDS: FRENCH AND AMERICAN POETRY IN TRANSLATION is a collection of poetry and essays presented at "Charting the Here of There: French and American Dialogue in Poetry," the historic conference held at the University of Southern California and Otis College in April 2003. Seventeen poets from both countries participated in four panels and three readings, while an exhibit was concurrently held in USC's Doheny Memorial Library, featuring French and American poetry journals from the mid-19th century through the present. Bilingual readings were given on both campuses as well as at Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles. The conference grew out of the research and writing of Guy Bennett and Béatrice Mousli's Charting The Here of There: French & American Poetry in Translation in Literary Magazines, 1850-2002, a book which chronicles the ongoing history of Franco-American literary exchanges.

Review of Two Worlds: French and American Poetry in Translation

Poetry

Poetry. Allyssa Wolf's first collection of poetry examines the tension between acting and being, as well as the possibility of ethically practicing illusion using theatrical language and stage devices. The book is structured as a vaudeville in five acts, with four of the acts being serial poems and the other a poem-play. Each act represents the consciousness of a kind of performer, but instead of enacting speech from a stable persona, its speakers shift, in tightly wound time (with beginnings and endings), within the borders of each act. Inspired by the language, art, and lives of many different sources, from Lenny Bruce, to Harry Houdini, to Jean-Luc Goddard, to Annette Messeger, and William Shakespeare, as well as the history of puppets and automata, Wolf's virtuosity is not practiced in the shadow of any particular school of contemporary literature, nor is it an historical re-enactment. VAUDEVILLE, in the author's words, is a book "clearly written for strangers, for the movement of strangers."

Vaudeville

Wolf, Allyssa

Poetry. DOWN WITH THE SHIP is Ryan Murphy's first full-length collection of poetry. A staff member at the Academy of American Poets in New York, Murphy's work echoes a few other poets who've haunted that fair city-names like Berrigan and Ceravolo come to mind-but this is no mere derivative exercise. With a fine ear for cadence and an eye for the odd and illuminating line break, Murphy gleans the U.S. cultural landscape for both detritus and diamonds in the rough, emerging with a unique post-millennial blend of torqued language and affecting (if also disembodied) confession. In this beat-up world we can bat clean-up for the L.A. Dodgers and find joy in "That same old feeling,/a pop song" and yet at once concur that we fight darker thoughts, that "It is wrong/to want to punt/the child that wails/in the night." A fine debut.

Down with the Ship

Murphy, Ryan

Fiction. "The facts are simple enough: In September, 1909, a relatively unknown Freud spent a week in New York City, en route to a lecture series upstate at Clark University. The air ranged from muggy to stifling. The museum exhibition on antiquities, the one he had high hopes for, proved substandard. The crowds on the street smelled of industrial fluids and sweat. Even friendly faces made him squirm. The conductor on a tram tried to be empathetic: he ordered the crowd to make room for 'the old man.' But Freud did not see himself as old, not yet." Thus begins this off-the-wall collection from the author of The History of Forgetting. Pitched somewhere between fiction and essay, between short story and novella, FREUD IN CONEY ISLAND AND OTHER TALES uses what are possibly actual facts from the eminent psychoanalyst's life to produce beautifully meandering engagements with topics ranging from the work of Lissitzky to laserographic confocal search methods to the ideas of Freud himself.

Freud in Coney Island And Other Tales

Klein, Norman M.

Poetry. Translated from the French by Ann Cefola. With Hence This Cradle, Helene Sanguinetti blends the fairytale world of childhood with the sensual world of the adult in a sequence of poetic fragments that fuse the innocent and the intimate in a single lyric voice. Helene Sanguinetti is the author of three books of poetry: Alparegho, Pareil-a-rien, D'ici, de ce berceau, and De la main gauche, exploratrice. Her work has appeared in a several anthologies, most recently in 49 Poetes and L'Annee poetique 2005. Recently she collaborated with Anna Baranek on an artist's book, O III. HENCE THIS CRADLE, Ann Cefola's translation of D'ici, de ce berceau, is Sanguinetti's first book to appear in English. She lives in Provence.

Hence This Cradle

Sanguinetti, Helene

Fiction. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier. In his lifetime Severo Sarduy was best known for his exquistely wrought neo-baroque prose, but he was also an abstract painter and wrote plays and poetry in addition to fiction and essays. He abandoned medical school as a young man to pursue the world of art and literature, leaving his native Cuba shortly after the Revolution in 1960. He later became associated with the Parisian literary scene of the 1960's and 70's and later became a French citizen. Of his work Bruce Benderson writes, "Severo Sarduy was a baroque comedian and a callused workhorse in one...Each jewel-like sentence is structured with tawdry detail, only to unfold like a paper origami trick into new and more convoluted gesticulation, a new sacrilige."

Beach Birds

SARDUY, Severo

Literary Nonfiction. California Studies. History. Urban Design. Art. Poetry. Cinema. Edited by Guy Bennett and Béatrice Mousli. "How do you fit seventeen million people, eight thousand square miles, eighty-eight languages, and just as many religions, cuisines, traditions, etc., into a single poem? How do you present accurate facts and figures for a place in constant flux: three million newcomers each year, somewhat fewer deserters, constant earth movements, recurring natural disasters, and the resultant, inevitable shifts in physical and demographic boundaries?" SEEING LOS ANGELES offers nineteen contemplations on this elusive city, "collectively revealing the current shape of a city commonly referred to as shapeless."—Béatrice Mousli

Seeing Los Angeles: A Different Look at a Different City

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

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