BOOKS
Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth: a review
Adam Ganderson
10.29.08
Fanzine basically took the month off, so we get this review just in time for the remaining days of October - a month of nippy nights that creep up early and announce the Halloween season; behold here Adam Ganderson's review of Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal. You may have read the Norwegian side of things in Lords of Chaos, or got a taste of other non-Norwegian death metal bands in the excerpt "A Blaze in the North American Sky" from Brandon Stosuy’s forthcoming book that ran recently in The Believer. Here we get the Swedish death metal story, an instant classic, and required reading for music lovers and fanzine fans of varied yet discriminating tastes.
Review of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
Richard Parks
08.05.08
Baseball is best viewed live, though it’s also a comforting respite on a lazy day spent sprawled out on the living room couch. Speaking of couches, have you ever talked baseball on the couch at your shrink’s office? Did that baseball talk give you the answers you needed to reconcile a painful love/hate relationship with your father? Well probably not. But if so, or if you at least find the baseball-as-psychological lens interesting, you should check out Nicholas Dawidoff’s latest memoir The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball, reviewed here by Richard Parks.
Review of Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
Ben Bush
08.04.08
Hypertext Lit is no longer a fad but a fact. From the earlier experiments of Shelley Jackson and Robert Coover on to today's ebooks on iPhones and Kindles, electronic literature is here for the long haul, making its mark in more ways than you'd think. Ben Bush reviews a thorough study of the subject - Professor N. Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
Review of Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
Mark Asch
03.07.08
Worlds within words within worlds. Mark Asch tackles the infinite regression of Steven Millhauser's latest short story collection.
45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme
Brian Howe
01.24.08
You'd think for the latest collection from Donald Barthelme, the man who left us the sets 60 Stories and 40 Stories, he might have settled on an even medium of 50 stories, but alas, never predictable (and dead, so obviously not making these decisions), gives up his ghost again in a new collection just 5 short of mathematical balance. Fitting for a writer whose sentences of anal algebra glean amidst an illusion of sweet anarchy (that makes no sense, I am all blurbed out). Brian Howe reviews Flying to America: 45 More Stories, Turkish delight for the Barthelme completist. Cover image of B. by Danny Jock.