Positive4ColumnsLike the Voice itself, The Freaks Came Out can be an unruly, lawless read, suffering the limitations of its strengths. Romano’s oratorio, so dynamic and robust, at times slips into cacophony ... Still, this book is a bona fide treasure chest.
Prudence Peiffer
PositiveBookforumThroughout the book’s first half or thereabouts, Peiffer advances her premise by weaving historical facts about the Coenties Slip into the artists’ stories, interjections that sometimes weigh down her narratives’ otherwise ascending arcs ... The Slip performs here most convincingly as the artists’ silent interlocutor and coconspirator—a source of free materials and affordable space—and as a metonymy for the fleeting years and figures that compose the whole of this story.
Gary Indiana
Rave4ColumnsThe intellect of playwright, novelist, essayist, and critic Gary Indiana is notoriously brawny and sure-footed, ranging across, to borrow his words, \'the queasy context of the modern world\' with an assurance and elegance largely unfamiliar to our era’s torrential toadyism and its twin, cancellation ... A triumphant collection ... Appreciated on the level of his sentences alone, Indiana is a lapidary wielding a straight razor ... Fire Season is in fact full of admiration, even terrific tenderness, for many of its subjects, proving throughout what an exacting reader he is of character. No contradictions are left unturned ... What becomes clear in reading this collection is that American culture is so habituated to bright-siding, readers can lose sight of the fact that venom, administered appropriately, is medicine ... Giggling, shuddering, even at times a little nauseous, I found myself only once dissenting from Indiana, not because of his point-blank candor, but because I perceived him to humble himself uncharacteristically and unnecessarily ... Indiana’s hungry readers will devour these essays and lick their chops, feeling satisfied as they wait for more from him.
Niki De Saint Phalle
RaveBookforum... ebullient, poignant ... What is compelling about Rudick’s book is that it is something of an antidote to all that, putting forward a form—the \'(auto)biography\'—in which the two authors are both present and accounted for fairly and correctly. More quietly, What Is Now Known also clarifies editing as a creative act rather than a definitive one. Saint Phalle wrote nothing for this book, and yet this book is written by her. Embracing that contradiction, Rudick enables the artist to speak for herself, as herself, once again.
A.L. Snijders, tr. Lydia Davis
RaveBookforumLike Davis, Snijders can compose rich, complex life studies in just a handful of sentences, extracting profundity from the absurd, and vice versa. Their sensibilities are so well matched that one can hardly imagine a better translator and interlocutor for him than Davis; that kinship is likely why this collection feels so smartly, exquisitely wrought ... At his best, Snijders sends a reader shooting across one of his loosed synapses. None of his zkv’s are ever tied up neatly ... Night Train doesn’t include the dates of Snijders’s stories as a collection typically might, an editorial choice only worth mentioning because for many years, writing was reputedly a daily practice for him ... his stories mark time—of days, thoughts, memories, encounters—yet as he himself believed, it is fiction that renders time immaterial.
Bernadette Mayer
RaveBookforum...a treasure of a book ... What is so: this dreamy volume gathering the eleven hundred photographs and two hundred pages of rolling prose that Mayer produced in those thirty-one days. It is as much a conceptual exercise as a diaristic one, a Hydra dancing at the intersections of language and image, calling forth what time and a voracious mind can create there ... Mayer’s sentences simulate life’s whoosh—its uneven rhythms, the crashing half thoughts ... Her seductively offhand snapshots make modest monuments of daily nonevents: a slack clothesline strung from a window; a tidy white curtain blown by a breeze; a ceiling light glowing at night; a friend, her hair pulled back, sitting in the front seat of a convertible; a lover, nude, reclining in the bath. To a reader leafing through Memory now, Mayer’s feral run-ons may elicit a wistfulness for an era that appears so much freer than our own, and her photos’ rich cinematic hues might prompt a person to wonder how our age, so manically documented, seems far less vivid in comparison. And while prescience is always a dicey claim, Mayer’s self-portraits, often taken while staring into the lens, somehow appear like eerie proof that she was seeing us long before we would see her.
Lisa Robertson
RaveBookforumLike her previous books, [Robertson\'s] latest is a work of buoyant loveliness and muscular erudition, a lush thicket of thoughts that here enrich the ease and breeziness of personal narrative with the chewier textures of history, criticism, and literary theory ... Robertson’s writing folds, continuously, crossing timelines so now and then stand face to face. Between them is a fertile playing space in which Robertson thinks roundly on subjects such as authorship and inheritance and the imposition of the oddball, unshakable conditions called feminine, called poet, called I ... part of the delight of this book is wrestling with how exactly to apprehend and define this Escher-like interiority that Robertson and Hazel Brown cohabit—kind of—with [Baudelaire] ... Robertson/Brown is not flatly enamored of Baudelaire (readers may get weary and need to drop a ball once in a while when juggling a three-in-one writer-mind) ... Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Trans. by Philip Boehm
RaveBookforumMalina is a work of harrowing, head-spinning magnificence, and Philip Boehm’s new English translation—a revision of his first, which was published in 1990—brilliantly imparts the elegance of Bachmann’s mind, feral and full and excruciatingly alert ... Bachmann’s is a deft miscreation, relaying the deranging realities of being a woman by way of sentences that rush forth like life force from an open jugular ... Malina will perhaps be most perplexing to readers who believe that the most one can make of literature is perfect sense ... Bachmann is at the height of her powers in the book’s second chapter ... her prose glows white hot to illuminate the unthinkable—the deportations, the gas chambers, the murdered, the complicit—all the while refusing to reinscribe, or reify, fascism on the level of form ... The condition of paradox can be fiction’s prerogative and playground and—at a time when language is pulped from all sides in the pursuit of power—one of its most potent charges. As Bachmann’s books remind us: To cower in the delusion of certainty rather than reach for the greater and freer would damn us to fates we wrote long ago, ones we could have rewritten.
Olivia Laing
PanBookforum\"Ah, romance! Who wouldn’t like a sweet, sweeping love story right about now? But unfortunately, Kathy isn’t a terribly riveting heroine, proving herself insufferable nearly right out of the starting gate ... Next to Acker’s long shadow and the literature she has inspired, Crudo gives off little light. The fact that Laing wrote it in seven weeks has been touted almost as an act of experimentalism; the book’s dust jacket crows that its story \'unfolds in real time\'... It doesn’t take a deep dive into that line to understand what’s meant: Crudo is diaristic, written, edited, and published quickly, and therefore its shortcomings, if not perceived as virtues, should be overlooked, excused ... Although Crudo, which just so happens to mean raw, was intended as such, it feels, in the end, merely half-baked.\
