The layered surface cascades into itself as quickly as it interrupts itself. It vibrates like a field of electricity, full of chaos and psychedelic apparitions, and yet is held together by an arresting unity which appears to emerge at once from above and below — that is, it appears as calculated as it does spontaneous.

Ioanna Kostopoulou reviews Genese Grill’s translation of Robert Musil’s Theater Symptoms

For Anvil and Rose 12, Inspector Watt returns with reviews of books from Paul Celan (tr. Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (on Celan), Alen Hamza, Lara Mimosa Montes, and a COVID anthology edited by Alice Quinn.

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Herman Van den Reeck reviews books from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Andres Cerpa, Andrew Levy, and Jackie Wang.

“We hear the intuitive Bloom, the open and receptive reader, the brooder and fabulous conversation partner, talking and chuckling, searching and scowling; we see him rubbing his brow and thinking aloud…”

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Inspector Watt reviews books by Agustín Guambo, David Lehman, J. Michael Martinez, Maureen N. McLane, and Chelsey Minnis.

Adam Morris reviews Padma Viswanathan’s new translation of São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos. “The novel is at once a merciless satire of social class in postcolonial Brazil, and a sensitivity reader’s worst nightmare.“

Joe Safdie hits two bird with one stone reviewing Ammiel Alcalay’s A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs and his forthcoming Ghost Talk.

Herman Van den Reeck returns for 5 lightning reviews of books by Justin Phillip Reed, Lana Del Rey, Maria Dahvana Headley, Eliza Griswold, and Norman Finkelstein.

‘Song. Sang Freud. Spread on the chalcedony, a land there is no title to.’ And where is that? …

The artist Tom Leaver is a painter who dons rubber gloves, dips his fingertips into the palette, and spreads gestures across the canvas. To him, it is an act of meditation, the procession of time throughout a day distilled into an image.

From within Varela’s rough text, Lara extracts unexpected threads of forms, unarticulated rhythms and figures of speech that keep the metaphors together and yet, by the same token, undermine and fulfill Varela’s austere treatment.

The wish to avoid the difficulties of attempting to reproduce Valéry’s own rhyme and scansion is understandable, but replacing them with another set of procedural impositions doesn’t necessarily allow the translation to do justice to the original.

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.

Every word of this book is Angel, ἄγγελος, the potently vitaminal vessel through which eternity manifests as dilatory consciousness in this world.

In a new twist on the Anvil and Rose column, Inspector Watt reviews the reviews of Dwight Garner.

Herman Van den Reeck reviews books of poetry by Kerrin Mccadden, Deborah Paredez and Richard Blanco, and anthologies of Affrilachian and Conceptual poetry.

What does it mean to identify with these characters? To find their struggles the same as my own?

Equal parts Star Wars, On the Road, Deleuzean war machine, and surrealist delirium, this poem-ever-in-progress is literature on steroids, philosophy on acid. It is scandalous, funny, erudite, and endlessly generative. It is an epic without organs.

Gay and lesbian artists would be best served by curators and gallery-goers taking their work seriously as art, and rejecting the sexualized promotional copy which today passes for queer aesthetics.