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Amigoland by Oscar Casares
Amigoland
A review by Benjamin Moser
A brambly Latin-American patriarch is the hero of Oscar Casares's Amigoland (Little, Brown $23.99). The ninety-one-year-old Don Fidencio is holed up, miserably, in a nursing home of the book's name in a Texas border town, furiously protesting his confinement -- "He had more trouble with just the idea of being here with these old men and women. He knew he wasn't old like some of them" -- though Casares shows, of course, Don Fidencio needs to be where he is, chronicling in excruciating detail the humiliations that await those who outlive their time. Don Fidencio is not a very pleasant...
The Original of Laura by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The Original of Laura
A review by Heller McAlpin
When Vladimir Nabokov died in Switzerland in 1977, he left explicit instructions for his heirs to destroy the penciled index cards that made up his work to date on his unfinished 18th novel, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). Vera, his loyal wife and amanuensis, who died in 1991, couldn't bring herself to do it. And, fortunately, after much debate, neither could their son, Dmitri. Of course, it's one thing not to burn the partial draft, and another to publish it. But, although Nabokov may be squirming in his grave, Nabokov fans and scholars have reason to thank Dmitri for his brave...
Little Oceans (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) by Tony Hoagland
The Poet as Magellan
A review by Abby Travis
In his new chapbook Little Oceans, Tony Hoagland attempts "to catch a glimpse of life's interior" as he asks: "Am I just some kind of little Magellan standing at the rail of my ship, holding a spyglass to my eye as I sail around and around the world?" Hoagland's world is dotted with uncrossable little oceans: every day we try to make the journey to some undiscovered destination of progress, but each time we flounder and are lost somewhere out in the middle -- and yet, he notes, we remain unchanged. Hoagland begins this small collection with what might seem a proper conclusion: "so we were...
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Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood by Melissa Hart
Melissa Hart's Memoir from the Heart
A review by Katie Schneider
"What's best for the child." The phrase gets bandied about a lot in divorce proceedings. For a young Melissa Hart, it was a judge's justification for taking her away from her mother, a loving, vibrant woman who happened to be a lesbian. "I must consider what's best for the children," the judge said. "A woman living with another woman, on a dangerous street with volatile neighbors?" The contrast between her father's sterile suburban lifestyle and her mother's warmth is at the center of Hart's new memoir, Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. "There were no Latinos, Chicanos or...
Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics) by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Evicted From His Own Head
A review by Elaine Blair
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a writer even most Russians knew nothing about until his work was resurrected from Soviet archives and published -- most of it for the first time -- in the late 1980s. He was ethnically Polish and grew up near Kiev. He studied law without much enthusiasm, worked for an attorney in that city for a few years and spent as much time as he could writing and lecturing on literature, drama and music. In 1922, when he was in his mid-30s, he moved to Moscow hoping to make a living from his writing. His timing was not auspicious. Krzhizhanovsky became acquainted with...
The Fat Studies Reader by Esther (edt) Rothblum
Weighing In
A review by Jessica Holden Sherwood, PH.D.
With a winning audacity, The Fat Studies Reader announces its intention to serve as the foundation of a new academic field. Its editors present convincing voices from law, medicine, social sciences and the humanities, making it difficult to dismiss their case that the time has come for fat studies. As the student authors of one essay note, the subject overflows disciplinary boundaries the same way their bodies overflow the desks in their college classrooms. Most Americans have accepted the health-focused conventional wisdom that obesity is a medical condition demanding prevention or...
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