Literary Nonfiction. Travel Writing. South Asia Studies. "Irreverent is a good word to describe this chronicle of a four-month sojourn in North India and the Himalayas undertaken by a group of California college students, teacher and novelist Rosenthal, his poet wife, and their daughter. But it merely hints at the many dimensions of Rosenthal's roguish and frank travelogue, what with its thorny detail, skepticism, and chutzpah; complex philosophical, political, and spiritual conundrums; acid humor, mystical chaos, and cosmic surrealism. It helps that Rosenthal, hailed everywhere they go as 'Cowboy' thanks to his feathered hat, has been immersed in Buddhism for several decades, enabling him to extract lessons in the nature of illusion from every ludicrous, alarming, or gratifying episode within the cacophony and crush of Kolkata, the breathtaking beauty of Bhutan, the impossibilities of Sikkum, and the labyrinthine surprises of Kathmandu. Rosenthal vividly recounts time-warping complications, extreme discomfort and illness, suffocating train rides, terrifying maneuvers on crumbling mountain roads, the ferment of immense markets, bloody border conflicts, terrorism, spontaneous friendship, and glorious vistas. As he shares his affecting adventures swimming in the Ganges and visiting temples, monasteries, and a zoo without animals, Rosenthal contemplates epic suffering and transcendent beauty in a wry and transporting tale of both earthly and metaphysical journeys"--Donna Seaman, Booklist.

Are We Not There Yet?: Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan

Literature & Fiction

ROSENTHAL, CHUCK

History & Criticism

What Books Press

Poetry. "In these intensely female, lively luscious songs it's Colette meets Beyonce meets Lil Mama meets Cixous and in comes Kristeva meets Molly Bendall meets Gail Wronsky, and therefore streams continual surprise--eros kisses big bad boogie man theory and 'word as noose' slang jumpstarts high-flown lingo and it's all so playful and yet deadly serious--how these poems issue from one urgent, collective, Medusa-like mouth, one it's high time is heard"--Gillian Conoley.

Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems)

Arts & Photography

Bendall, Molly

Fiction. These stories, powerful eco-fables of down-home Americana, take place during the relentless rollover from one millennium to the next in a world remarkably like our own--and not. In one, for example, a girl exquisitely tuned to the sorrows of history ends up in a city blasted by light where she gets the chance to try dreaming things over. In another, a boy born lacking the ability to distinguish phonetic difference grows up to be a famed musician. There's a dapper, square-headed astronomer who discovers the origin of stars, and a tiny-footed climber who scales the tallest mountains in the world at the end of time. As mothers and children, husbands and wives struggle to make sense of whatever still remains, the one thing they share in common is their determination not to miss a single beat. Or, as one narrator remarks, "The next time we imagine the world, let's try to imagine it whole."

The Origin of Stars and Other Stories

Haake, Katharine

Poetry. "The phrase 'Russian novel' suggests thickness, density, and richness. All those terms apply to Cantwell's poetry or, more precisely, to the life in the poems. These are active pieces that plunge into the thick of things and pulse with motion, regardless of whether the setting is past or present. They show as they describe or recollect, and they don't recollect in any apparent tranquility or with regret. 'A late cousin speaks,' walking and talking the life of addiction--the needle, coffee, cannabis, the white rock--that culminates in the recognition of happiness, however sordid, however self-isolating. Old friends reconnect at a convention's hotel bar, last to be seated and staying so far beyond closing that the management gives them an unsubtle hint, 'and yet we linger.' Three poems realize incidents from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a big paragraph of which is this book's epigraph. Poems on the deaths of artists and friends, even when they're very long gone, indeed--see 'Marlowe in Italy'--hail their subjects' follies and vices equally with their achievements. This is poetry teeming with light, darkness, color, movement, heat, cold, sound, and silence. Reading it is like watching a complicated, demanding movie or, in full consciousness, life--Ray Olson, Booklist.

One of Those Russian Novels

Cantwell, Kevin

United States

Fiction. "I read the book as soon as I got back from Vegas. Then I read it again. His four leading men were Jews stumbling through late middle age, New Yorkers who despise and love each other in about equal measure. They were, as a group, stunned before their own capacities for trouble--schmendricks who fail ecstatically. Most remarkable were Camoin's sentences, which bristled with the supple dynamism of Bellow, the jazzy patter of Elkin"--Steve Almond.

April, May, and So On

Camoin, Francois

Fiction. Medieval philosopher Master Siger finds himself condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church, but in a world of late 20th century technology; he makes alliances with sexy philosopher nuns and monk double agents to escape the clutches of the Papal Mafia and the Franciscan Highway Patrol in a labyrinth of drugs, sex, car chases, and back alley plots.

Master Siger's Dream

DeAnnuntis, A W

Literary

Art. Latino/Latina Studies. The B-movie THE GIANT CLAW is Gronk's Citizen Kane in this reprise of Mitch MacFee's and Mlle Mathematician's meeting with, what else, a giant claw. Drawing for Gronk is writing, or perhaps writing is drawing, possibly a book of poetry, since its language is images, each page organized with the fragility of poems, laced with elegant verbal and visual puns. 100 illustrations. Foreword by Gail Wronsky translated into Spanish by Alicia Partnoy.

A Giant Claw

Gronk

Fiction. Son of a Mexican Creole soldier and a Comanche shaman, Coyote O'Donohughe learns shape-shifting from his mother and turns the tide of history in the Mexican Revolution, at the Alamo, the Battle of San Jacinto, and the Comanche wars against Texas Rangers. You don't know how much the history books got wrong and how funny all that stuff really was.

Coyote O'Donohughe's History of Texas

Contemporary

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated into Spanish by Alicia Partnoy. Characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream float into and out of contemporary landscapes contemplating love, art, language, and otherness in mischievous and serious ways. Here "quick bright things" "come to confusion" but often to tenderness and understanding. Alicia Partnoy's inspired translations uncover surprising surreal beauty and cross-cultural insight.

So Quick Bright Things

Wronsky, Gail

Lyrical, provocative, and deeply haunting, The Time of Quarantine takes us into a near-distant future of post-human environmental collapse to chronicle the tale of a boy raised alone in the woods by computers at the end of the world--or is it? As the sole surviving member of an ill-fated Intentional Community designed to escape world's-end plagues and convinced he is alone on earth, the boy--now a man--is determined to carry out the final wishes of his father and fulfill his stoic duties of being merely human. But when he discovers, as if by accident, that everything he's always imagined to be true is instead a lie, he decides to leave the safety of his little spinning plot of spaceship earth and go back into the world to find out what comes next.

The Time of Quarantine

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