Set in war-torn, German-occupied Poland during World War II, Pornografia is a key text of late modernism — and this is the first edition that is a translation into English from Gombrowicz’s Polish. (The previous edition came into English from a French translation.)
Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.
Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s the winter of 1969 in Gordita Beach, a mythical beach town near the Palos Verdes peninsula. The Summer of Love, never really alive in Southern California, is still a “great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side.” Pot smoke and nearby Long Beach petroleum refineries thicken the air. The Manson Family arrests and trial burn broadcast bandwidth. Larry “Doc” Sportello is on the trail of… Something. Something big. Maybe. If only he could quit smoking long enough to remember how to answer the phone.
A lovely young woman is drugged, brutally raped and murdered. That hardly sounds like a scenario for a funny, sweet and devilishly complex mystery story, but that’s because novelist Colin Cotterill is a master of sleight of hand. He’s a master at balancing brutal crime, which he depicts with heart-wrenching empathy, and the comic milieu of Dr. Siri Paiboun.
One-time cyberpunk Kadrey (
A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.
, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy. 
has just been named one of the “best books of the year” by 
Nisi reads from her new story collection, Filter House, and answers questions about African Americans in speculative fiction, Filter House, and Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction at 
is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are “truth speakers.” Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that “they mean what they say, and say what they mean.” One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush — Rush that Speaks is his full name — spends time with a “gossip,” a wise woman, named Painted Red.
Call Nisi Shawl’s marvelous first collection of stories slipstream, call it speculative, call it curvy fiction for the straight-ahead twists that bend her fiction — they’re all grounded in experience. In Shawl’s stories, calling upon an African goddess is no more speculative than hailing a taxi, and following a bird to enlightenment is as normal as talking to your mother on Sunday. In Shawl’s realities, imagination is a force to be reckoned with, and the universe teems with life and spirit and desire.
