"I’m here on behalf of your breast, okay? I’m an ambassador of the breast. Would you like to know what your breast has been writing about, obsessively, in Russian Lit? Your breast writes about a runaway nipple." from "Dismemberment" by Ray Levy clereviewofbooks.com/dismembermen...

Congrats to our fiction editor Caren Beilin!

"Elkin’s characters illuminate something of the systems that they were born within; systems shaped by America’s global reach, our competing needs for belonging and independence..." Annette LePique on "The Franchiser" by Stanley Elkin @dalkeyarchive.bsky.social clereviewofbooks.com/stanley-elki...

"Kaplan deploys novelistic form as a way to represent and probe the various and also competing desires underlying the social upheaval and where and how it all fell apart." Jonathan Larson On Leslie Kaplan’s “Miss Nobody Knows” clereviewofbooks.com/leslie-kapla...

"This ground we walk on sopped dreams up so we could hear the leopard talk through the crush of roughnecks in the moon pool." excerpt from "The Disinherited" by Terrence Arjoon @uglyducklingpresse.bsky.social clereviewofbooks.com/terrence-arj...

"But of course, I should say about Pirkko Saisio: people call her a living legend." Jordan Barger interviews Mia Spangenberg, translator from the Finnish of Pirkko Saisio's "Helsinki Trilogy." @twolinespress.com clereviewofbooks.com/mia-spangenb...

"I have invented a form of thinking about literature — Hmmm & Bang — which may appear playful (because it is) but which (make no mistake) is a challenge to our dispositions, our ungainly knack for categories." -Emiliano Gomez, "HMMM & BANG" clereviewofbooks.com/hmmm-bang-an...

"do you overwhelm, in traffic, do you have a favorite, sibling, or season, or a star, no one, knows, what you are thinking, even when you tell them" 4 poems by Alex Tretbar clereviewofbooks.com/four-poems-a...

"Wong’s West Coast novel and Geoghegan’s East-Coast-turned-Midwest memoir are both preoccupied with the experience of being just on the outside of a movement, not quite at the center but not quite separate from its concerns." -Lillian Lippold clereviewofbooks.com/which-side-a...

MARK YOUR CALENDARS 🗓️ Fiction candidate Willow Campbell will be reading at the Cleveland launch party of @clereviewbooks.bsky.social’s latest issue 🎙️📓 12/14 @ 6:30 @ Dunlap’s Corner Bar See you there 🧐

"The chickens are organizing a game. It appears to be a putt putt tournament, or something like it. A hybrid of poker and minigolf. At this point, I realize my plan has backfired." from "From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson" by Zack Darcee and Elise Houcek clereviewofbooks.com/from-from-th...

Jeff Alessandrelli's essay remembering Alice Notley at @clereviewbooks.bsky.social is really moving & so full of Alice's presence. In the background of Jeff's piece is another story: small press publishing changes our lives & our shared world. clereviewofbooks.com/alice-notley...

"Rage can be just as much a lifeforce as pleasure". Alyse Burnside On David Wojnarowicz’s “Memories that Smell Like Gasoline” clereviewofbooks.com/david-wojnar...

"Romano’s memoir is an early example of feminist life writing, comparable to the work of not just of Ernaux, but also the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and the autobiography of Marguerite Duras." Eliza Browning on Lalla Romano's "In Farthest Seas" clereviewofbooks.com/lalla-romano...

"In fact, once he knows he has Mare and Bern completely under his spell, he sends them on errands. For a serial killer, he is incredibly lazy about the necessities of everyday life, like money and food." from "Their Many Names" by Jess Richardson clereviewofbooks.com/their-many-n...

community mausoleum is putting out some of the best stuff rn--I loved this book.

"What [New Romantics] are calling for is not a simple resurgence of feeling, a giving of ourselves over to every passion we have, but rather a conversion of desire." John-Paul Heil on Joshua Wren, Sally Thomas, and "New Romanticism" clereviewofbooks.com/new-romantic...

CRB 3.2: Revolutionary poetics, the Paris Commune, containers as cultural memory, feminist unsexing of language, the ethics of digression, grief as technology, art in munitions bunkers. If you flip through it fast, the stars spin. Welcome to the zoetrope.

“One of the ironies of his posthumous reputation is that, to be read and accepted by canonical scholarship, James had to be embraced by scholars whose views ran directly counter to his own.” — Peter Huhne on two new critical perspectives on Henry James both from @NYRB_Imprints

I. was 9 when I fell from the window for language. from "Vision Sans Seraphim" by Jed Munson. clereviewofbooks.com/from-vision-...

"The poets grapple with what it means to create a purpose-built archive and the ways in which this impulse counters the traditional principle of the archive." Megan McKenzie on "Permanent Record" clereviewofbooks.com/read-backwar...

In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.

"These plots I conceive easily They describe action As original as the sun’s constant production The bells that ring across the estuary Draw the hours in and together" Three Poems by Hannah Piette clereviewofbooks.com/three-poems-2/

"Randolph Healy deserves to get noticed. The Ireland-raised poet and math teacher—who will turn 70 next year—has been assembling thoughtful, counterintuitive poems, short and long, into small press volumes since the 1980s." Stephanie Burt on Randolph Healy clereviewofbooks.com/stephanie-bu...

"Canetti obsessively writing the same phrase, in slightly different permutations, decades apart; me, attempting again and again to capture my grandmother—where does that impulse come from, the need to record?" Emma Heath on Elias Canetti and death clereviewofbooks.com/elias-canett...

Temptation fragrant energy Floribunda in memory Floribunda remind me / Madame madame in memory of all America shrub flag line bangs wind from "Deadheading" by Jon Conley clereviewofbooks.com/from-deadhea...

"Sometimes when I think of Midwestern in terms of being proud that you’re from the Midwest, I think of breweries, and coffee shops, and things that are very branded in this way that then became described as Williamsburg." Chris Molnar interviews Natasha Stagg clereviewofbooks.com/garage-rock-...

Give a sailor’s greeting to the contributors of CRB Vol. 3.2. This here list looks a little something like the mag's back cover. By subscribing, you'll get this issue in your mailbox, soon. Use the discount code THEBIRDS to get 30% off any level.

"Kojève’s reflections on the conditions of politically meaningful action and philosophy speak to our current zeitgeist where history seems neither dead nor alive." Alexander Aerts on Kojéve's "Kant" clereviewofbooks.com/less-chatter...

This is great 🙏🏽

“The Nobel Prize is fitting, if anything: Alfred Nobel established the prize out of guilt as a 'death merchant,' and now our greatest novelist of decay and destruction has been given the dynamite money.” Evan Grillon on Krasznahorkai clereviewofbooks.com/laszlo-krasz...

"My cat wasn’t lost but everyone in the neighborhood kept calling me. “I found your cat,” they said, and then they would describe my cat to me." from "Hurricane Envy" by Sarah Jaffe (published by Rescue Press) clereviewofbooks.com/from-hurrica...

"Contemporary manosphere literature certainly paints a landscape of patriarchy in crisis, at war with itself about how it should wield its own power." Leah Abrams, "Into the Manosphere—in Manuscripts" clereviewofbooks.com/into-the-man...

3.2 is coming soon, and if you subscribe by Nov 7 you'll be among the first to receive it in the mail + one of the last to receive the (few) remaining copies of 3.1. Use the discount code THEBIRDS to get 30% off any level. I don't know. If you like print. Collect them all.

"The book is an umbracle for gradations of in-between: secrecy, lies, faith, and fantasy." On the occasion of the release of the unredacted paper history of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, Nicole Kaack revisits Don DeLillo’s Libra clereviewofbooks.com/bullets-appe...

"Why is there a theater in the basement of a clinic? What is happening? A novel is like that, about something happening, which feels off, or false, to focus on that considering." from "Sea, Poison," by our new fiction editor, Caren Beilin. clereviewofbooks.com/caren-beilin...

"Morrison could push through a book about Black life and history, formally more of a collage than a narrative, to great success because the economic, political, and commercial stars aligned." Adrianna Michell on "Toni at Random" clereviewofbooks.com/when-chloe-m...

"a university is not a television station. a university is not a circle you can walk around. a university is not a telephone or a table lamp or a table. a university is just a plot device." from "Groceries" by Nora Claire Miller @fonografeditions.bsky.social clereviewofbooks.com/nora-claire-...

“The result is a multifaceted hybrid text that draws on and expands some of the most striking surreal imagery from her paintings.” In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social‬‬, Eliza Browning reviews Leonora Carrington’s newly reissued novel, “The Stone Door” - clereviewofbooks.com/surreal-visi...

"'The Stone Door' can initially seem puzzling...[but] the seemingly disjointed narrative strands coalesce to form the story of the opening of the stone door and a metaphorical journey between one world and the next." Eliza Browning on Leonora Carrington clereviewofbooks.com/surreal-visi...

For the @clereviewbooks.bsky.social I wrote about incorporating myself as ELVIA INC, believing that the only way to keep being a writer was to become a corporation—but instead I crashed my car, got dommed by Hobbes' Leviathan, and was ransomed by the IRS. clereviewofbooks.com/elvia-incorp...

"It [seems] that a culture, no less than a mid-century modern chair, can get the Ship of Theseus treatment: rebuilt with a new part here and another there until, finally, it is both itself and not." Philip Harris on Jenny Erpenbeck's "Things That Disappear" clereviewofbooks.com/jenny-erpenb...

"[One could take] its aesthetic limitations as formal affordances... "Shadow Ticket" perhaps traces the attitudes and semiotics of pre-emergent fascism, [like a] historiographical broadcast from State fascism’s inchoate moment." Cobi Chiodo Powell on Pynchon clereviewofbooks.com/thomas-pynch...

"I now realized that for thirty years I’d had an imaginary Pietsch perched on my shoulder, and as I reworked sentences I kept (unconsciously) turning to him and asking, 'How about now? Would you take it now?'" Vince Czyz on publishing & conglomeration clereviewofbooks.com/the-age-of-c...

"One wonders how Perec’s Jérôme and Sylvie might have responded to the upheavals of May 68. Latronico powerfully leaves us with little to imagine." Gregory Jones-Katz on Vincenzo Latronico's "Perfection" @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social clereviewofbooks.com/perfection-v...

“The narrative of ‘The Hairdresser’s Son’ is deceptively desultory, proceeding in short chapters that slowly ramp up into a plot.” In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social‬‬, Rebecca Starks reviews Gerbrand Bakker’s newly translated novel, “The Hairdresser’s Son” - clereviewofbooks.com/rebbeca-star...

Pasolini @ Bright Lights; Kurosawa, Aronofsky, and Spike Lee @newleftreview.bsky.social; Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Neo Sora @ Metrograph; OZ @defector.com; James Benning @clereviewbooks.bsky.social … and lots more! Did You See This? www.criterion.com/current/post...

"Without history, we risk becoming those ants of post-war Düren, struggling without their queen, scurrying around, aimless, suicidal, and without purpose, bound to repeat our worst mistakes." Gus O’Connor on Michael Lentz's "Schattenfroh" clereviewofbooks.com/michael-lent...

"The ability to read oil is central in how it might allow us to read anew larger social structures that make the United States and its hegemonic global influences." @vikamujumdar.bsky.social on Jung Yun's "O Beautiful" and petrofiction today. clereviewofbooks.com/o-beautiful-...

I wrote about Sebastian Castillo’s new book “Fresh, Green Life” for @clereviewbooks.bsky.social about one man’s quixotic journey to the end of the night. clereviewofbooks.com/vow-of-silen...