Nonfiction
Review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout
Few novelists write characters as improbably multitudinous as Paul Beatty. In The White Boy Shuffe, Gunnar Kaufman is a poet, basketball player, and messiah. In Tuff, Tuffy Foshay is a drug-slinger, competitive eater, sumo-wrestling enthusiast, and candidate for city council. In Slumberland, Ferguson ‘‘DJ Darky’’ Sowell is a sax player, jukebox sommelier, porn film composer, …
Working Girl
I want to be a model or a writer. I am neither of these things. What I am is fifteen and five foot eight, with collarbones deep enough to drink my black coffee out of, a head full of dreams, and a job with Western Australia’s largest and only Sunday newspaper. The job is my …
Federer as Irreligious Experience
In 2006 David Foster Wallace opened his much celebrated New York Times Magazine essay “Federer as Religious Experience” with “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when …
A Body of Athletics: An Introduction to the Possibilities of Sport
Before every basketball game, from rec league to high school, my mother told me, Knock ‘em dead. She never said, Good luck. * When Prairie Schooner asked me to solicit twenty to forty pages of writing for a “sports themed” issue, I was in a castle in Umbria, Italy, reading Pedro Salinas, writing poems and …
Swimming in the Rain by Chana Bloch
Chana Bloch. Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015. Autumn House Press. If the current American poetry world divides into “barrelers” and “lingerers,” as poet and critic Dan Chiasson has put it, then Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015, places her among the fine lingerers. She continues after …
Limber by Angela Pelster
Angela Pelster. Limber. Sarabande Books. Trees are the subject of Angela Pelster’s debut essay collection, Limber. Pine trees and poplar trees, sycamores and saskatoons, fig trees, maple trees, trees outside the essayist’s window and trees as far off, theoretically, as the moon. While the title Limber seems to conflate the words, “lumber” and “timber,” it …
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones. Prelude to Bruise. Coffee House Press. Saeed Jones’s first full-length book, Prelude to Bruise, is a necessary piece of contemporary poetry that bravely tackles issues such as abuse, promiscuity, homosexuality, and racism. Though the title hints at an agonizing inevitability, the collection implies that a bruise may, in fact, denote healthy progress. Jones’s …
The Night We’re Not Sleeping In by Sean Bishop
Sean Bishop. The Night We’re Not Sleeping In. Sarabande Books. Sean Bishop’s debut collection, The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, begins as a musical contract: “The signed agrees to breath, to the lungs’ soggy bellows” (“Terms of Service”). It quickly becomes clear that, for the speaker, the bargain we’ve struck is about waking to the …
It Will End with Us by Sam Savage
Sam Savage. It Will End with Us. Coffee House Press. Sam Savage’s latest novel, It Will End with Us, reads as part narrative and part philosophical meditation on memory and language. The novel’s first-person narrator, Eve, is haunted by the singular childhood event of her mother’s disintegrating sanity. Eve is an elderly woman, living with …