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Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein
Bloody Hell
A review by Eryn Loeb
When I was in middle school, a friend and I thought it was hilarious to call the Tampax helpline and ask ridiculous questions. Through barely suppressed giggles, we also had a blast requesting that tampon samples be sent to the homes of male classmates we thought were annoying and/or mean, oh-so-cleverly turning their names into "Davida" and "Mattie" when supplying their home addresses (this was met with the obvious skepticism of the bored woman on the other end of the line). At that age, every girl I knew was totally obsessed with periods: the mechanics, the freighted symbolism, the...
The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II by Ilaria Dagnini Brey
The Venus Fixers
A review by Benjamin Moser
I've developed some strategies for making my way through the paper forest that grows more lush with each visit to the post office, a profusion of books, galleys, and manuscripts that I instinctually divide into those that, for reasons of personal or professional piety, I feel I must look at; and those that I immediately, unhesitatingly want to look at, usually because they speak to one or another of pet interests. One such, as it happens, is vanished, faked, or looted art. I love a Van Eyck in a salt mine. I savor a discussion on the fate of the Czartoryski Raphael or the Amber Room. I was ...
Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline
'Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin' by Pierre Assouline
A review by Charles Solomon
With his plus-four knickers, button nose and "squiff" hairdo, Tintin ranks as one of the most recognizable and best-loved characters in comics. However, his creator, Georges "Herge" Remi (1907-83), remains "an elusive figure," as Pierre Assouline notes in this unsatisfying biography: "Most people expect his life to be as straightforward as the lines in his drawings. But it was full of complexity and contradiction, conflicts and paradoxes, of jagged peaks and crevasses." The basic outline of Remi's career has been reported many times: Born into a stuffy, middle-class family in Brussels, he...
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Misfits and Other Heroes by Suzanne Burns
With Suzanne Burns, There's Magic in the Misfit
A review by Sheila Ashdown
Suzanne Burns's Misfits and Other Heroes is a marvelous and weird collection of short stories, full of carnival-esque characters, fresh prose, absurdist touches, and... baked goods? (I'm still trying to figure out that last one.) There's a lot to unpack in these thoughtfully crafted stories, each of which merits a rereading, and Burns offers a fun-house mirror of human experience where everything feels distorted yet true. In "Tiny Ron," a normal-sized woman marries a movie-star dwarf, whom she meets while researching a news story at the Little People of America convention. While there's...
Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia by Mikhail Iossel
Russian Short Stories Capture Brutal Realities, Literary Renaissance
A review by Katie Schneider
Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Chekhov. Pushkin. The greatest names in Russian literature cast a long shadow. Their novels, plays, short stories and poetry captured the political, social and spiritual context of the 19th century. Now in the 21st, a young crop of Russian writers is interpreting their culture and times. Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia offers translated works from authors who have come of age since the collapse of the Soviet era. These modern stories, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker and published by Portland's Tin House Books, build on and expand the country's rich...
The Poetry of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke and Edward Snow
Angels to Radios
A review by Ange Mlinko
It is said that the tradition of English poetry began with Caedmon -- an illiterate seventh-century lay brother who, ashamed of his inability to versify when the harp was passed around at a feast, fell asleep in his stable among the animals and dreamed of an angel. This angel, too, bade him sing, and again Caedmon protested that he did not know any songs; but then, inexplicably, he found himself obeying the angel's dictum: "Sing the beginning of the creatures!" Immediately on waking he wrote down the eulogy to the world and its maker that had been transmitted to him in his dream; today the...
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