Medusa Beach

Medusa Beach
Author: Melissa Monroe
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1681374595

A new collection from one of the most exciting voices in American poetry. For many years, Melissa Monroe has been assembling one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry, drawing on all different kinds of writing, from technical manuals to books of spells to dictionaries of slang, to explore the many ways—poetry is, after all, one of them—in which we human beings seek to know and control the elusive realities of the world around and within us. Her subject is both the strangeness of things and the strangeness of the things we think, and she has an unsurpassed eye for the wilderness between them that we inhabit. The poems collected in Medusa Beach include “Planetogenesis,” recording the life of an imaginary planet; “Whiz Mob,” a sequence of haikus composed in the criminal argot of 1940s America; “Frequently Asked Questions About Spirit Photography”; and the title poem, which interweaves an account of the life and thought of the great German philosopher and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel with a meditation on the many historical and natural historical avatars of the figure of Medusa. As formally adventurous as they are rigorous, disconcertingly comic, and deeply strange, the poems in Medusa Beach are the work of a true American original.

Star Patrol 2

Star Patrol 2
Author: James A. Connell
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2012-02-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1468546457

This is a story of alien invasion set 300 years in the future. The fifteen to twenty meter diameter silver Globes were first thought to be a fleet of spaceships, but as it turned out they were creatures so different from Mankind that Humans could not communicate with them on any level. They could travel in space, and discharge destructive energy bolts that could destroy Human built spaceships. As part of their breeding cycle they infested planets with their offspring, nine foot long, voracious killing machines that devoured every living thing they encountered. The Globes soon became an unstoppable force that quickly destroyed the first two colonies they found. Although the third colony offered more resistance, it too was rapidly losing the battle for survival. Undetered, the Globes swept on and eventually reached the abundant Earth. Once there they moved in for the long haul. The early part of the story centers around a twenty-eight year old Medic fresh out from the Centaurus Colony. Samantha Wilson had taken a medical contract with the Star Patrol and arrived on the Lastchance Colony just in time to witness the first invasion. Within days she found herself alone and surrounded by lethal Slimers on a strange new world. Then came salvation in the form of the Star Patrol's Starship Orion, which, as Samantha's luck would have it, needed a Medical Officer. Samantha and Orion's crew follow the invading Globes from Lastchance and finally to Earth where Humans are totally unprepared for this new threat to their existence. Space battles with Globes, and planetary encounters with Slimers are all a part of the mix. Along the way Samantha finds lifelong friends and even love in places she never expected to be, even in her wildest dreams. Then while on a medical mission she and her Medical Technician become separated from Orion and the man she has fallen in love with. The unlikely pairing of Samantha, the doctor, and Mary Como, the soldier, acquire an ancient Starship and then find themselves on a planet hopping quest to find their missing ship and crew mates. They soon discover that even with aliens threatening mankind, there are still humans conspiring for dominance of the species. Although it is a story of alien invaders, the Earth and it's colonies, the thinly stretched Star Patrol, and human conspiracies. It is ultimately Samantha's story.

Medusa’S Lair

Medusa’S Lair
Author: Kenneth L. Funderburk
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2017-07-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1480850187

Chic Sparks is a clinical psychologist, famous tenor, and part-time investigator. After his beautiful, red-headed girlfriend, Suzy, convinces him to pursue a search for his former friend, notorious crime boss Ken Renfroe, he is soon pulled into the heart of a criminal enterprise that stretches from silk stalking bankers in Boston to the charismatic underworld leaders of the Sinaloa Mexican cartel. As a wild sea battle between two warring Mexican drug cartels ensues, Chic must navigate through constant conflict as he penetrates deeper into a dark world and searches for clues he hopes will lead him to Renfroe. After he uncovers a money laundering operation infusing billions of dollars of drug money into the world economy, the lair is revealed as bloody conflicts between the cartels come to a head in an ultimate battle for domination. Now only time will tell if Chic can escape the lair, bring the truth to light, and complete his mission to find Renfroe before it is too late. In this gripping tale, a modern day crime fighter on a quest to find a crime boss uncovers an international money laundering enterprise that places him in grave danger.

The Prince

The Prince
Author: R.M. Koster
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1468306499

Kiki, the son of a twice-ex-president, has inherited his father's thirst for power and the presidency. But to become president of Tinieblas takes a Machiavellian intelligence, for one must outwit not only political foes but the strong American interests. An insightful, furious, and funny depiction of twentieth-century Latin America, The Prince is an essential novel for readers of history and magical realism alike.

After Lorca

After Lorca
Author: Jack Spicer
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1681375419

Out of print for decades, this is the legendary American poet's tribute to Federico García Lorca, including translations of the great Spanish poet's work. Jack Spicer was one of the outstanding figures of the mid-twentieth-century San Francisco Renaissance, bent on fashioning a visionary new lyricism. Spicer called his poems “dictations,” and they combine outrageous humor, acid intelligence, brilliant wordplay, and sheer desolation to incandescent effect. “Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume,” writes the dead Federico García Lorca at the start of After Lorca, Spicer’s first book and one that, since it originally appeared in 1957, has exerted a powerful influence on poetry in America and abroad. “It must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations,” Lorca continues. “In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another of his own, giving rather the effect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his).” What so puzzles Lorca continues to delight and inspire readers of poetry today.

Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Author: Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1681376539

A new translation of work by one of the Netherland's most innovative, exhilarating poets, a poet who draws on everything from economics to parables to world history. The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation. This new selection of poems draws on all twenty volumes Wijnberg has published to date, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies—hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false—writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition. His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson enjoins. Wijnberg for his part has said, “Alienation is the last thing I am trying to achieve. The world is strange enough as it is and my poems help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it close and as far as possible trying to understand it.”

The Dissertation

The Dissertation
Author: R. M. Koster
Publisher: ABRAMS
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1468309099

This novel posing as a dissertation on León Fuertes, the fictional president of a made-up Banana Republic is “still fresh, funny, and disturbingly relevant” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). To fulfill his PhD requirement, Camilo Fuertes decides to write about his father León, the martyred president of Tinieblas, a small country in Latin America. As Camilo traces his family’s roots, we follow León along his twisted path through delinquency, learning, lust, and bravery to his historic position of leadership. At once a powerful vision of Latin American history and a brilliant parody of the academic form—complete with endnotes—The Dissertation is the second novel in Koster’s acclaimed Tinieblas trilogy, and an essential postmodern novel in the tradition of Vonnegut, Barth, and Nabokov. “One of the few books of the past 20 years that deserves to be called astonishing. It is a brilliant novel, structurally a marvel and, in all, a demonstration of elan as that quality seldom is experienced in a work of fiction.” —The Des Moines Register “Longtime Panama resident Koster portrays Latin America with a comedian’s sense of timing, a scholar’s sense of history, and a native’s fond despair.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Koster is that rare thing: a writer from the heart, passionate and uncompromising.” —John le Carré

Late Montale

Late Montale
Author: Eugenio Montale
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2024-05-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 168137837X

Late Montale is a generous selection of the poems that the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale wrote in the last decade of his life, including many drawn from notebooks he entrusted to his housekeeper, which appear here in English for the first time. In new translations by the American poet George Bradley that carry over all the wit and lucidity of the originals, each poem takes on a fresh immediacy. Together, they form an ideal introduction for readers unfamiliar with these late works, and for readers who have long admired them, a sparkling reminder of their subtle art of disillusion and surprise.

Shapeshifter

Shapeshifter
Author: Alice Paalen Rahon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1681375001

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time. Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.

Mandragon

Mandragon
Author: R.M. Koster
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2014-05-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1468310518

R.M. Koster’s Tinieblas Trilogy, which began with The Prince, a National Book Award finalist, and continued with the cult classic The Dissertation, is one of the landmarks of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. The first major work of English-language magical realism, the trilogy has been praised by Anthony Burgess and John le Carré, among many others. Mandragon, the final novel, is the darkly uproarious story of a strange and magical creature who toys with both sexes and reads minds, and who transforms the drought-wracked land of Tinieblas.