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Recent Reviews

Ms. Magazine

• Till We Can Keep an Animal by Megan Voysey-braig

Powells.com

• Meditations (Modern Library Classics) by Aurelius Marcus

Harper's Magazine

• The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard

The Oregonian

• The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

National Book Critics Circle presents Bookforum

• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Nation

• The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard

Rain Taxi

• The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu

• Click here for a list of all archived reviews

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (Public Square) by Andrei Codrescu Enter your email address below and seven days a week a new review will arrive in your mail. Email address: Click here to read about Powells.com's privacy policy. Reality's Restore Button A review by John-Ivan Palmer E ver want to run naked across a convention floor, pie-hit a bishop, or show up at a job interview in a firecracker hat, screaming poetry until security guards haul you away? Andrei Codrescu's The Posthuman Dada Guide may not be the literal how-to that the title implies, but it will definitely give you the historical and philosophical basis you need to justify a stunt to your cell mates while the authorities figure out what to do with you. The book's subtitle, Tzara & Lenin Play Chess, more accurately describes the book's central theme; it refers to an allegorical game, played in 1916 at the Cafe de la Terrasse in Zurich, between two immensely influential figures in 20th-century intellectual history -- a Jewish-Romanian poet and a Russian political fanatic. With Tzara the Great Scoffer and Lenin the Great Enforcer, it's like Kokopeli meets Big Brother. On the century's chessboard of death, Tzara and his affiliates validate themselves by "transcendent egress" (deranged buffoonery... Read the entire review More reviews from Rain Taxi

Lisa Roberton's Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson

If Lisa Robertson's poetry were a material, it would probably be plastic, so it makes sense that her new book Magenta Soul Whip begins with a poem called "Lucite." The poems in Magenta Soul Whip create a synesthetic world in which senses and surfaces are malleable, and structures are warped by our...

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In 1682, with a publication based on Mary Rowlandson's eleven weeks among the Narragansett Indians, a curious and contradictory genre of American literature was born. Women's captivity narratives offered romance and racism, hints of erotic transgression along with the reinforcement of norms...

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Science fiction has developed a reputation as a pulp haven for love-starved nerds fixated on starships, laser battles, and exotic she-aliens in need of rescue. A pleasant exception to this stereotype is Genesis, a novella that dares to explore the nature of free will and human consciousness without ...

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[Editor's note: This review contains explicit language which may be offensive to some readers. Please be advised.] Few writers can compose sentences like these with a literary straight face: I saw this gaze once in a Russian paramilitary policeman during the Yugoslav civil war; he soon held...

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's debut story collection The Thing Around Your Neck follows her 2007 novel Half of a Yellow Sun, affirming her storytelling skill and careful attention to landscape, character, and history. Nearly all of Adichie's protagonists in the collection are women. But they straddle...

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Russell Edson's nineteenth prose poetry collection, See Jack, continues to discomfort, provoke, and thoroughly entertain. Edson's poetry successfully couples the limitless fabulist world with the restraints of the mortal one; whether the result of this combination births laughter or terror, it is...

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In his celebrated graphic memoir Epileptic, French cartoonist David B. gave a personal account his older brother's forty-year struggle with a severe and degenerative case of the titular seizure disorder. Epileptic records how the cartoonist's family, in search of a refuge from the havoc wrought by...

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It is hard to imagine the United States without its non-profit sector. Many of the essential functions of society, from pre-natal care to cemetery maintenance, fall within the purview of non-profit organizations. Americans expect non-profits to heal the sick, feed the poor, create art, foster...

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We've grown accustomed to using categories -- like "Literature" on the one hand and "Horror," "Science Fiction," and "Fantasy" on the other -- to divvy up the world of fiction into the "serious" and the "not-so-serious." When literary writers David Markson and Graham Greene slipped off into genre...

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On June 9, 1865, Charles Dickens was returning from a trip to Paris, traveling by train from Folkestone to London. As the train approached the river Beult near Staplehurst, the rail viaduct spanning the river collapsed. Incredibly, the engine was able to jump the 45-foot gap between the rails, but...

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The Wolverton Bible by Basil Wolverton

Bodies: Big Ideas/Small Books by Susie Orbach

The Book from the Sky by Robert Kelly

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda

Min' Okubo: Following Her Own Road by Greg Robinson

Flowers of Flame: The Unheard Voices of Iraq by Dan Veach

Swamp Thing #01: Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore

Brothers by Yu Hua

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

The Lagoon by Lilli Carre

Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi

Well-Built City Trilogy #01: The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher

On Purpose by Nick Laird

The Reverend's Apprentice by David N. Odhiambo

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope by Emmanuel Guibert

Apocalypse Nerd by Peter Bagge

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction by Toni Morrison

The Ghost Soldiers: Poems by James Tate

Tonoharu: Part One by Lars Martinson

Rex Libris by James Turner

The Fortieth Day (American Poets Continuum) by Kazim Ali

Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

All Souls by Christine Schutt

A Curious Earth by Gerard Woodward

Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen

Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul Drummond

The Stone Keeper: Amulet, Book One (Amulet #01) by Kazu Kibuishi

American Music by Chris Martin

Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean Paul Sartre

What's the Use of Truth? by Richard Rorty

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche

Laura Warholic: Or the Sexual Intellectual by Alexander Theroux

The Entire Predicament by Lucy Corin

Fourth Realm Trilogy #02: The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks

Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe

Regards from Serbia by Aleksandar Zograf

8: A Memoir by Amy Fusselman

Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi

John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes by John Peel

Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma

The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture by Richard J. Degrandpre

Fangland: A Novel by John Marks

Trial of Flowers by Jay Lake

Glacial Period by Nicolas De Crecy

The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit by Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna

The Uncomfortable Dead: A Novel of Four Hands by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos

Academic Freedom After September 11 (06 Edition) by Beshara (ed.) Doumani

The Flowers of Evil (Wesleyan Poetry) by Charles Baudelaire

The Mystery Guest: An Account by Gregoire Bouillier

Rain Taxi, a winner of the Alternative Press Award for Best Arts & Literature Coverage, is a quarterly publication that publishes reviews of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an emphasis on works that push the boundaries of language, narrative, and genre. Essays, interviews, and in-depth reviews reflect Rain Taxi's commitment to innovative publishing.

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