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? …

Every creation has resonance beyond itself. Our participation in nature is a creative act by which nature knows its further nature, as we know our own.

With Octave away, it’s up to Maurice to defeat a surreal foe. Will he rise to the occasion, or has he met his match?

There are two types of sailors in this world: the raucous kind who party well into the night…and Fauntleroy!

An astonishing medley of de-centered avant-garde and the late Neolithic, the poems of Bustriazo Ortiz breathe fresh air into the migratory Spanish language.

Jon and German go out dancing. They have a great time…but is it enough?

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.

To create something new, at best, is to give an intimation of the potential that is obstructed, and hence, by a contrast however faint, to draw attention to the obstruction and the pain it induces.

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.

A trip to the bar might be a commonplace activity for most, but when Octave pays a visit anything is possible!

Fauntleroy has a spring in his step and a song in his heart…and with a job like his, that’s not an easy feat!

El arte modernista para Trotsky no podía ser considerado como una nueva cultura sino más bien como una expresión de la tarea y demanda de trascender la sociedad y cultura burguesas.

Jon’s desires are thwarted again, but German will always be there for him.

Excerpt from Bohumil Hrabal’s homage to Vladimír Boudník, The Gentle Barbarian, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson and introduced by Mia Ruf.

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.

Octave sets out for Debonairia, while Maurice stays to guard their money. Parting is such sweet sorrow!

Fauntleroy is working on a fishing boat to feed his appetite for adventure. He seems destined to find plenty of that, but life on the sea isn’t easy!

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.