Project MUSE®: American Book Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Book Review.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 27 (2005) through current issueLatest Articles: American Book ReviewTWOProject MUSE®American Book Review2153-45780149-9408Latest articles in American Book Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Paradox of Postliberal Humanism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982120
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You might have noticed that libraries have been increasingly banning books that celebrate inclusion. Conservative citizens have been storming public library and city council meetings demanding that works that depict values and ways of life contrary to those supported by evangelical Christians be kept away from children or taken out of circulation.You might have also noticed that offices and programs dedicated to diversity are being closed. First state and now federal regulations are being established by the alt-right that discourage, if not directly outlaw, programs aimed at providing support for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color as well as those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallThe Paradox of Postliberal Humanism2026-02-07text/htmlen-USThe Paradox of Postliberal Humanism2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®299202026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Introduction: Supply-Chain Capitalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982121
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It has often been observed that the world of late capitalism is structured by equations. It is one where everything is for sale, including democracy. But what is less apparent about the world according to neoliberalism is the central role of supply chains to its operation and optimization. Further complicating this are recent observations that neoliberalism is now mutating into what Alberto Toscano describes as late fascism and what Yanis Varoufakis terms techno-feudalism, each of which functions as a face of contemporary capitalism. While policy frameworks (such as neoliberalism) and political coups (such as that being undertaken during the second Trump administration) are front-page news as the target of scorn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallIntroduction: Supply-Chain Capitalism2026-02-07text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Supply-Chain Capitalism2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®183702026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07The Beer Game
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982122
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In the 1960s, American business students began playing a new game. In the Beer Game, students conduct a simulation of a business environment by forming teams to represent each division (production, distribution, retailing, etc.) within a beer manufacturer. Using demand and inventory signals passed along from other divisions, each team attempts to balance beer stock with consumer demand.The point of the Beer Game is that almost every class of novices is terrible at it. When each team attempts to optimize its individual situation, it does so at the cost of other divisions. The result is a pandemonium of oversupply, undersupply, high costs, and low profits for the company as a whole. The manufacturer, attempting to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallThe Beer Game2026-02-07text/htmlen-USThe Beer Game2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®116782026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Out of Supply, Indefinitely
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982123
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The corporate university is the paradigm of higher education today. This means that the best practices for higher education in the United States come from the business world, not the world of education. As progressive higher education diligently pushes back on the protocols of late capitalism with the aim of overcoming its destructive legacies, mainstream higher education—or what is now termed neoliberal academe—increasingly looks to the business world for its operation manual.Within academe, the corporate university values above all the guidance of its business school. It is the major resource for the corporate know-how needed to fine-tune its strategic plan for peak performance. After all, who knows better than
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallOut of Supply, Indefinitely2026-02-07text/htmlen-USOut of Supply, Indefinitely2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®125922026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Supply Chains in a Blasted Landscape
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982124
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Supply-chain theory might have issued fully formed out of the brain of Milo Minderbinder, the character who enthuses about monopoly capitalism all through Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 (1961). Nike's head honcho organized a supply chain that would allow his company's least-profitable operations to be exported to Korea and Taiwan. Korea and Taiwan could in turn fob off their own most backward technologies to China, Vietnam, and other less-developed South Asian countries. This offloading chain leaves each country one cycle of innovation behind its predecessor. But everyone could be pleased by this arrangement because, as Minderbinder might say, "Everyone gets a share." "We don't know the first thing about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallSupply Chains in a Blasted Landscape2026-02-07text/htmlen-USSupply Chains in a Blasted Landscape2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®153722026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Rich Man's Cognitive Mapping?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982125
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Directing a critical eye toward supply chains, I will be affirming the ongoing relevance of Fredric Jameson's "cognitive mapping," a concept Jameson borrows from geography, where it has been used to explain how individuals negotiate the spaces through which they move. To theorize Kevin Lynch's descriptive account of it in Image of the City (1960), Jameson's essay in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) first indicates that, given the structuring conditions of global capitalism, all locals are now shot through with nonlocal forces, albeit contradictorily, unequally, and differentially. Second, he adds ideology as a key aspect of cognitive mapping, since ideology is the irreducible medium of all our
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallRich Man's Cognitive Mapping?2026-02-07text/htmlen-USRich Man's Cognitive Mapping?2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®158692026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07The Fentanyl Supply Chain, or Corporations as Cartels
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982126
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The story of our current drug-supply crisis is often told as a story of border control—we are inundated with discourse about the threat of fentanyl "tainting" our drug supply after crossing over the Mexico–US border, or being shipped over from China via the dark web. Fentanyl is often characterized as an outside force slipping through our "weak" borders that threatens the very fabric of our society through increased homelessness and crime. If you were to drive about twenty minutes north of Philadelphia's City Center, you'd reach Kensington, one of the poster-child neighborhoods for the opioid epidemic in the United States. The largest open-air drug market on the East Coast, Kensington is also considered ground zero
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallThe Fentanyl Supply Chain, or Corporations as Cartels2026-02-07text/htmlen-USThe Fentanyl Supply Chain, or Corporations as Cartels2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®113632026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Israel, Divestment, and the American Libidinal Order
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982127
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I would like to begin my reflections here with a curious dictum that former president Joe Biden was fond of repeating: "If Israel didn't exist, we would have to invent it." Our present discussion of supply-chain theory presents an opportunity to think through the libidinal and symbolic economy this statement indexes, as well as the material economy that is bound up with American affective investments in the idea of Israel that Biden points to in his dictum. What does this "invention" of Israel supply? What libidinal attachments do such pronouncements comfort? What meanings, what chains of signification, is the signifier "Israel" meant to secure, to manage, to integrate? What becomes of Palestinian lives and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallIsrael, Divestment, and the American Libidinal Order2026-02-07text/htmlen-USIsrael, Divestment, and the American Libidinal Order2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®129962026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Organizing Life in the Ruins of Supply-Chain Capitalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982128
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The now oft-cited declaration that it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism finds imaginative force in HBO's adaptation of the Emily St. John Mandel novel Station Eleven. The limited series grapples with the end of capital accumulation, networked commodity chains, the internet—the end of a kind of world, or world-making process. The show's central pandemic, a virus that kills 99 percent of the global population, breaks open the networks and infrastructures of the globalized and densely connected world; we see them clearly as industrial vectors for contamination and sites of post-pandemic ruin. However, what emerges in the wake of the apocalyptic pandemic is a vision for a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallOrganizing Life in the Ruins of Supply-Chain Capitalism2026-02-07text/htmlen-USOrganizing Life in the Ruins of Supply-Chain Capitalism2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®143332026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Everything Airy Becomes Solid
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982129
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There was a giddiness that characterized the dominant narratives of globalization. Stretching from the late 1980s through the recession of 2008, globalization was a buzzword, a set of economic practices, and a debated claim to originality (for the world-systems analyst, the capitalist world economy had been around since at least the sixteenth century). It was also a structure of feeling in Raymond Williams's terms, at least for those on the winning sides of the transformations it underwrote. It is not surprising that the era was defined by postmodernism, reflexivity (as theorized by Anthony Giddens), and utopian conceptions of a new global connectivity. This connectivity was everywhere evident from technology (the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallEverything Airy Becomes Solid2026-02-07text/htmlen-USEverything Airy Becomes Solid2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®144512026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Myriam Gurba: Vanguard Crónista
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982130
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Writer, activist, counselor, and radical healer, Myriam Gurba is a genre-defying force whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and multimedia art. Each work is honed by her razor-sharp wit, radical candor, and fierce intersectional critique. From her fiction—Dahlia Season (2007) and Painting Their Portraits in Winter (2015)—to genre-blending nonfiction like Mean (2017), to the searing essays in Creep (2023) and Letter to a Bigot (2020), Myriam confronts misogyny, racism, and trauma with biting humor and luminous prose. Her poetry (Wish You Were Me [2011]) and the co-created zine (Extrañx [2019]) bend form and language, carrying us past the edges of the known, into realms where sense and imagination dissolve
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallMyriam Gurba: Vanguard Crónista2026-02-07text/htmlen-USMyriam Gurba: Vanguard Crónista2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®271682026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Boom!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982131
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The market in audiobooks continues to boom. The pun is intended. What exactly would be meant by a book boom? Or, in what sense might a book boom? This question is perhaps not an entirely improbable starting point for launching a regular feature on "Sound" in a periodical devoted to the book. How does a book sound? How does one sound a book—make it sound, or sound it out and thus test what might be called its soundness? A boom is, of course, not just any sound. It arrests. It disturbs. It fills the space. This onomatopoeia suggests loudness, depth, resonance, even the voice of God. It thus gestures toward another transitive sense of "to sound" as to fathom or measure the depth of, say, a body of water. To sound a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallBoom!2026-02-07text/htmlen-USBoom!2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®125292026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982132
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Amid the slow, tortuous decline of their affair, just after year two, Hans and Katherina take a trip together, their first, to Moscow. They see the sights, they dine and make love in "magnificence," in a beautiful hotel. At night, Katharina sleeps and Hans ruminates on the dead of history, near and far: "The new was born bloody, and who will wipe the blood off it?" And who takes, who carries, the guilt for the killing—the thousands, the millions, the friends, the lovers, the family? All for "the cause" or causes, cause after cause after cause? When does it end? Hans thinks the young Katherina, born after the war and after the birth of the German Democratic Republic, does not carry this burden, but she does, and has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallKairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USKairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®118062026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07In My Eyes, You are Beautiful by David Unger (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982133
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The author of this captivating coming-of-age novel, David Unger, brings to it his deep, lifelong relationship with Guatemala and Central America. He was born in Guatemala City just a few years before the 1954 coup that toppled Guatemala's president and forced Unger's family to leave the country because of its political instability. The future author then grew up in Miami, Florida, spending summers in Guatemala. His first language was Spanish, which he still speaks along with English, the language he uses for his literary creations—his fiction and poetry, plus his translations from Spanish (e.g., most recently his acclaimed Mr. President by Miguel Ángel Asturias [2022; original 1946]). He calls himself a "chapín
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallIn My Eyes, You are Beautiful by David Unger (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USIn My Eyes, You are Beautiful by David Unger (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®114762026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07You Shouldn't Worry about the Frogs by Eliza Marley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982134
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Raise the topic of fiction structured around absurdism or dystopian concepts, and one may respond with commentary about plots and developments that have gruesome, grotesquely macabre, or even fatal consequences to characters and result in catastrophe within the immediate surroundings. After all, characteristics like nihilism, irrationality, dark humor, and deep existential factors drive this kind of writing.In a collection of ten compact short stories, Eliza Marley mainly crafts prose scenarios that really cannot happen in the world as we know it; nearly all of the plots and outcomes within You Shouldn't Worry about the Frogs clearly fall into the absurdist genre: a ubiquitous plant that suddenly grows in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallYou Shouldn't Worry about the Frogs by Eliza Marley (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USYou Shouldn't Worry about the Frogs by Eliza Marley (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®100752026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Parade by Rachel Cusk (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982135
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Rachel Cusk followed up Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018)—a trilogy that has garnered much attention for its innovations in novelistic form and narrative interiority—with her 2021 novel Second Place, which carried over many of the same concerns but took them in a different formal direction. Inspired by and very loosely modeled after Mabel Dodge Luhan's Lorenzo in Taos, itself a series of letters addressed to American poet Robinson Jeffers giving an account of her acquaintance with D. H. Lawrence, Cusk's Second Place features a narrator M who writes to a correspondent named Jeffers about the painter L, who is staying for a time at her property to paint. Despite this shift, Second Place offers the same
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallParade by Rachel Cusk (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USParade by Rachel Cusk (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®112342026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07The Worst Thing of All Is the Light by José Luis Serrano (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982136
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The Worst Thing of All Is the Light is the first English translation of Spanish writer José Luis Serrano's novel Lo peor de toda es la luz, from 2015. Lawrence Schimel's translation, published by Seagull Books of Calcutta, India, brings this metafictional and multimodal novel to the English-reading audience via Seagull's enlightened Pride List of contemporary and classic queer literature by writers from around the globe.Serrano's novel alternates between two narratives. The first is an account of a gay married couple's vacation in the Basque Country, told by one of the unnamed husbands, who happens to be a novelist. For ten days in late August, they enjoy Bilbao and the surrounding area. Ten sections recount the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallThe Worst Thing of All Is the Light by José Luis Serrano (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USThe Worst Thing of All Is the Light by José Luis Serrano (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®128412026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Wild about Harry by Henry Grinberg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982137
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Henry Grinberg has written the most endearing and at times painful coming-of-age novel from the perspective of nine-year-old Harry Glass. Harry is a very bright, curious, and completely guileless young fellow, born in London to Jewish immigrant parents from eastern Europe. His parents are both emotionally damaged from their own childhoods, and are being re- traumatized by the rise of Hitler. They treat young Harry without empathy or compassion as if he is an unwanted burden:
"Be quiet" begged my mother, "Daddy's listening to Mr. Chamberlain." But I was apparently incorrigible, always fidgeting, always noisy, always underfoot, always presuming to join in the conversation of my elders. They could do nothing with me.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallWild about Harry by Henry Grinberg (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USWild about Harry by Henry Grinberg (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®114032026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07The Atlas of Remedies by Paul Jaskunas (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982138
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The philosopher Alfred Korzybski's adage that "the map is not the territory" comes to mind while reading Paul Jaskunas's new novel, The Atlas of Remedies. Not because its protagonists, a mother and her two children, navigate through perilous circumstances without maps; and not because the one guide that might indeed save them is jettisoned long before they reach their destinations. The Atlas of Remedies is a book about the regions of the mind, how far they might stretch or be restricted, and what happens when they are nurtured and ignited. Every human mind carries its own map or understanding of itself and the world around it, and it is in this awareness of its surroundings and predicaments that a certain kind of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallThe Atlas of Remedies by Paul Jaskunas (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USThe Atlas of Remedies by Paul Jaskunas (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®87142026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07The Crucifixion of Truth: A Screenplay by Bernard Starr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982139
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In a sense, not in a bad sense, Bernard Starr's new screenplay, The Crucifixion of Truth, is thesis-driven in that the author lays out the main point, one well worth making, both in his introduction and in the mouths of characters. The point is that the historical Catholic Church—he focuses on the Renaissance period—has fueled antisemitism by presenting Jesus as not Jewish or, if it is conceded that in childhood he followed Jewish customs, that he split with the faith when he matured and founded Christianity. It's an argument that the scholarly Starr seems well qualified to make judging by his list of previous publications, which include Jesus Uncensored (2013) and Jews, Jesus and Anti-Semitism in Art (2016), which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallThe Crucifixion of Truth: A Screenplay by Bernard Starr (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USThe Crucifixion of Truth: A Screenplay by Bernard Starr (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®92472026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Writing While Reading, or How to Avoid Accidents While on the Road to Becoming a Writer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982140
<p></p>
I can no longer read the fine print. I can't read the backs of bottles and boxes. I can't read the instructions needed to assemble furniture or any of those small-type explanations that require an agreement before you purchase an app. The last time I had my eyes examined I was told one could see cataracts slowly writing a memoir inside each eye. Laser surgery, folks claim, is routine but now and then I find myself standing next to someone whose surgery didn't go well, and well, I don't want to think about it. I want to think about how I need my eyes to read and how I love the foreplay of turning pages and taking books home from libraries and bookstores. I find I read better when I'm not wearing glasses and the room
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallWriting While Reading, or How to Avoid Accidents While on the Road to Becoming a Writer2026-02-07text/htmlen-USWriting While Reading, or How to Avoid Accidents While on the Road to Becoming a Writer2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®111332026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Edward Said and the Ivory Tower
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982141
<p></p>
Although most people would likely cite Orientalism (1978) as Edward W. Said's magnum opus, given its widespread influence, and especially given the title's transcendence of its subject matter, Said himself would likely have considered Culture and Imperialism (1993) the more important work. In its very first paragraph, in fact, he notes the limitations of the former study, requiring this sequel in which he endeavored to "expand the arguments of the earlier book to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories," thus addressing "the general relationship between culture and empire." Said employed what he called a contrapuntal approach by which to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallEdward Said and the Ivory Tower2026-02-07text/htmlen-USEdward Said and the Ivory Tower2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®163232026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07A Fish Called Babel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982142
<p></p>
Scientists and linguists have long been preoccupied with the question of how human beings might talk to extraterrestrials. There have been various proposals for a galactic lingua franca, or rather a lingua cosmica, that could translate between our human languages and their alien tongues. Stephen Spielberg's 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dramatizes that translation encounter, as does Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival. Amy Adams, playing a linguistics professor, is called upon to facilitate communication with extra-terrestrial heptapods. At one point, she holds up a whiteboard upon which is written "human." That would leave our philosophers of the posthuman a little nonplussed, one suspects, as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallA Fish Called Babel2026-02-07text/htmlen-USA Fish Called Babel2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®141472026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07T'shuvah by Richard Jeffrey Newman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982143
<p></p>
Richard Jeffrey Newman's T'shuvah ("repentance" or "atonement" in Hebrew) draws its spiritual, erotic, and musical elements from many sources: Orthodox Judaism, Islamic mysticism, Renaissance sonnets, classical Persian ghazals and rubaiyat, and his experience of South Korea, Iran, and the five boroughs of New York City. All of these are called upon to illuminate the process of arriving at (and returning to) a self that has finally come to terms with an experience of violent childhood sexual abuse.Newman's prior collections, The Silence of Men (2006) and Words for What Those Men Have Done (2017), address that trauma. The poems in those volumes explore the suffering of the speaker as a boy abused by an older man, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallT'shuvah by Richard Jeffrey Newman (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-UST'shuvah by Richard Jeffrey Newman (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®133112026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Best Barbarian: Poems by Roger Reeves (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982144
<p></p>
In the title essay of his 1962 book The Barbarian Within, Walter Ong explored the complex relationship between Greeks and barbarians. Greeks need barbarians (outsiders) precisely because the latter are different. Arriving on the scene with their own culture and traditions, they offer Greeks something new and unfamiliar, which is what any culture needs to keep from calcifying. Fittingly, Roger Reeves's Best Barbarian begins with a poem titled "Grendel," who in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf occupies the position of barbarian to the Danes whose mead hall he invades. Reeves's version of Grendel is more irenic than his Anglo-Saxon counterpart, for there is no marauding and killing. Rather,Apparently, these humans do not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallBest Barbarian: Poems by Roger Reeves (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USBest Barbarian: Poems by Roger Reeves (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®139732026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Sukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982145
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Sukun: New and Collected Poems, by Kazim Ali, spans eighteen years of published poetry, including eight books that have traced Ali's artistic evolution over time due to personal circumstances, social conditions, and the places the poet resided, which include the United Kingdom, Canada, France, India, the Middle East, and the United States. Jane Hirshfield described Ali's earlier book Fasting for Ramadan (2011) as "deeply, quietly revelatory," which also applies perfectly to Sukun. Hirshfield characterized his writing as "intimate and public": Ali is not a protest poet; nor is he apolitical. He writes from his everyday life, memory, or travels, but brings a vast range of art, philosophy, and history into his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallSukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USSukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®201172026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07In the River of My Sleep by Paul Dresman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982146
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Paul Dresman passed away in January 2025 and left this book of mostly poems along with a fascinating prose memoir called American Labyrinth (2024). All of these writings were "taken from life," as they say in photography. The other meaning of that phrase holds true too, of course; they and he were taken from life too soon. But what we visualize as we read them is perhaps not their most important aspect. There is also what might be called "a sound basis." The visual imagery is joined by sonic play to give these poems their strength. We hear the voices involved, their patterns of plain speech and song are both personal; a person emerges from what we hear in our heads. Dresman has peopled these pages with some
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallIn the River of My Sleep by Paul Dresman (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USIn the River of My Sleep by Paul Dresman (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®124792026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Dora/Lora by Larissa Shmailo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982147
<p></p>
There are some intelligences that see the many facets of an issue and, in their refusal of the easy answer, turn them over and show their complex brilliance. It's similar to what we find in a poet like Geoffrey Hill, where something like the interplay between title and poem often produces extraordinary nuance. Larissa Shmailo is a similar intelligence. Like Hill, she wrestles with history, specifically that of the Holocaust. But her history is personal, since her parents and grandparents survived the camps. This is the center of her newest collection, Dora/Lora. The first poem exemplifies the difficulties we will face throughout:Approaching this tercet alone, we might be tempted to simply see it as a turn to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallDora/Lora by Larissa Shmailo (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USDora/Lora by Larissa Shmailo (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®127452026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Anon by Steven Seidenberg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982148
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Anon, one of Steven Seidenberg's most recent literary works, leads the reader into an alternative viewpoint on the human experience of space, and thereby of subjectivity broadly thought. By keeping the narrative voice in a state of uncertainty, Anon skillfully moves through narrative challenges to explore the difficult-to-describe reality of the environmental crisis. The reader immediately wonders: Is this poetry or prose? Upon randomly opening the book, the reader encounters what appears to be prose: consistently dense paragraphs without line breaks, reminiscent of excerpts from an ancient memoir or a contemporary novel. Contrarily, by looking somewhere else in the book one might wonder if this is a unified
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallAnon by Steven Seidenberg (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USAnon by Steven Seidenberg (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®126102026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Poems of Good Love … and Sometimes Fantasy by Pedro Mir (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982149
<p></p>
Two old neighbors meet after many years apart without contact. They exchange news of how their lives have treated them:How's your health?Great! Gym in the morning, 5-mile run at night!And the business?Fantastic! Swimming in money!And how about … (wink wink!) … you know, in bed?Better than ever: we're up to six great-grandchildren!If you're laughing, apologize to Mother Nature: as far as she's concerned, Max's answer is the only right one: procreation. All else is nonsense. Her eternal purpose is to keep life going in living things, at least long enough to produce the next generation. After that she loses interest in the no-longer-fertile individual.Really? But what about respect for the virtues of your sexual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallPoems of Good Love … and Sometimes Fantasy by Pedro Mir (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USPoems of Good Love … and Sometimes Fantasy by Pedro Mir (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®110102026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Judicial Uses of Images: Vision in Decision by Peter Goodrich (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982150
<p></p>
In 1994 in Jonesborough, Louisiana, Terry Wayne Jackson—hauled into the courthouse for disturbing the peace—made a run for freedom. What happened next is open to dispute. Was he pushed through the plexiglass window? Or did he leap, believing the window to be an open doorway? What was not open to dispute was the tragic consequences of his fall, which left him paraplegic. He sued, arguing that the appearance of an open doorway posed an unreasonable risk. The judge thought otherwise, and included an image of the window in the text of his opinion to show (as he explained) that it could not be mistaken for a doorway. But in the image, the window is not visible. What the frame holds out to our view instead is trees, a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallJudicial Uses of Images: Vision in Decision by Peter Goodrich (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USJudicial Uses of Images: Vision in Decision by Peter Goodrich (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®134972026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech by Brian Merchant (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982151
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In Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant tells the story of the Luddite rebellion in the industrial midlands of nineteenth-century England. It is a story that is akin to our current technological revolution. Gig economies, automated work, and extreme legal lenience for large-scale corporations were all problems that the Luddites fought against two centuries ago.The Luddites were everyday working men and women who fought back against poor wages, job loss, and tyrannical mismanagement. They fought against the large-scale textile factory owners through Parliament and even through violent protest. By retelling the Luddite story, Blood in the Machine suggests that the technological revolution we are seeing today is not a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallBlood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech by Brian Merchant (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USBlood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech by Brian Merchant (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®122692026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Teeth: An Oral History by John Patrick Higgins (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982152
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Finally, the pandemic gave John Patrick Higgins something to smile about. With a mask, he could grin without fearing the grimaces of others. In Teeth: An Oral History, Higgins provides a history of the mouth (his own and a handful of famous others) and invites the reader on a series of dental appointments to improve the quality and aesthetics of his own teeth. As he frames the beginning of the text: "Teeth, more than eyes, are the window to the soul." The author clearly sees the world through the mouth. It is his prism for understanding the entire world.As Higgins establishes, teeth are not neutral parts of the body, in the way a hand or a foot or a lip may be. Teeth reveal character vices: a penchant for coffee or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallTeeth: An Oral History by John Patrick Higgins (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USTeeth: An Oral History by John Patrick Higgins (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®94912026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07From Mimetic Translation to Artistic Transduction: A Semiotic Perspective on Virginia Woolf, Hector Berlioz, and Bertolt Brecht by Dinda L. Gorlée (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982153
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In her latest work on translation and semiotics, Dinda L. Gorlée explores how literary texts of many forms can be retranslated, self-translated, or even auto-translated by other creatives to develop new works of art. From Mimetic Translation to Artistic Transduction is a creative reimagining of the theory of artistic translation. It focuses on laying out definitions of translation, retranslation, self-translation, artistic translation, and transduction (all central to the main aims outlined at the start of the book), as well as intersemiotic translation (introduced via Jakobson), semiotranslation (introduced in relation to Peirce), transmutation (via Jakobson), hypertranslation (via Peirce), and transuasion (in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallFrom Mimetic Translation to Artistic Transduction: A Semiotic Perspective on Virginia Woolf, Hector Berlioz, and Bertolt Brecht by Dinda L. Gorlée (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USFrom Mimetic Translation to Artistic Transduction: A Semiotic Perspective on Virginia Woolf, Hector Berlioz, and Bertolt Brecht by Dinda L. Gorlée (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®118862026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Out of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, and: The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI by David Hajdu (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982154
<p></p>
Two remarkable books, two remarkable authors. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, editor of American Book Review and also of the rather more specialized symplokē, has written a couple of dozen volumes on the various qualities of literature (and literacy), culture, higher education, and higher theory. David Hajdu, erstwhile music critic for the New Republic (now for The Nation) and a journalism professor at Columbia, put together a very fine graphic novel, and that is my own personal favorite of all his plaudits.In times gone by, critics complained that the question "Read any good books lately?" had been ruined by the movie versions. What, even now, deep into postmodernism, do these two volumes have in common with that complaint?
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallOut of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, and: The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI by David Hajdu (review)2026-02-07text/htmlen-USOut of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, and: The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI by David Hajdu (review)2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®119082026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Scenes: Sagging Meniscus Press: An Interview with Jacob Smullyan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982155
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I started Sagging Meniscus to publish a shaggy monster of a novel, Hoptime (2017)—from which the silly names of our press and also of our journal, Exacting Clam, are taken—as a memorial to a late friend. That quickly turned into a quest to publish other writers I knew whose work had been distributed through informal or unconventional means. Almost immediately, attracted by the focus on writers who did not compromise their vision—who wrote "books that want to be themselves"—several other wonderful writers soon came aboard and had a decisive influence. The learned, grave, and wacky Joe Taylor, editor of Livingston Press, has been not only an important contributor through his novels and stories but a helpful adviser.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallScenes: Sagging Meniscus Press: An Interview with Jacob Smullyan2026-02-07text/htmlen-USScenes: Sagging Meniscus Press: An Interview with Jacob Smullyan2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®110442026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Do We Need a Poetics of Stupidity Now?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982156
<p></p>
I am inspired to raise this question by a new book: Sigi Jöttkandt's The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (2024). This book is a volume in Open Humanities Press's series The Nethercene: Ecocide & Inscription, both of whose series editors, Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, offer prefatory "takes" on what this book inspires in them, specifically distinguished as a foreword by Colebrook and a preface by Cohen.Both Colebrook and Cohen see the post-2000 period as progressively self-destructing, with the technics of the bursting-upon-the-global-scene of the internet and the social media epoch as compared with the immediate hyper-ironic and reflexive modernist past, trailing clouds of increasingly inglorious
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallDo We Need a Poetics of Stupidity Now?2026-02-07text/htmlen-USDo We Need a Poetics of Stupidity Now?2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®96012026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07Tribute to Master Author N. Scott Momaday
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982157
<p></p>
I've written several books, but to me they are all part of the same story, and I like to repeat myself, if you will from book to book, in the way that Faulkner did—in an even more obvious way, perhaps. My purpose is to carry on what was began a long time ago; there's no end to it that I see.The writer N. Scott Momaday died on January 24, 2024, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was eighty-nine years old. For me, learning of the death of someone you value so much as a carrier of art and vision like Momaday always gives you a sense of loss that feels like losing a family member or a dear friend. The feeling of that loss rises from the pit of your stomach as though a part of yourself has died. This is true
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/467/image/coversmallTribute to Master Author N. Scott Momaday2026-02-07text/htmlen-USTribute to Master Author N. Scott Momaday2026-02-072026TWOProject MUSE®109632026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-02-07