Critical Notes

Roundup 21

By Jane Ciabattari

James Marcus surfing a wave of attention for his booty-shaking Philip Roth sampling, drawn from his Roth interview last September: The Guardian, the NY Times, the German press….

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s latest memoir, “Not Now, Voyager,” gets a thumbs up from David Ulin.

Rigoberto Gonzalez begins his residency at The Robert Frost Place with a reading there on July 5th.

Mary Ann Gwinn talks to Wendy Marcus, editor of Drash magazine.

Regan McMahon call’s Jonah Raskin’s “Field Days” “a book that focuses on what really matters.”

Kate Walbert’s “remarkable novel” “A Short History of Women” “unfolds briskly,” notes Rebecca Donner.

NBCC member and poetry award winner Troy Jollimore finds that Robert Wright is not afraid of being controversial in “The Evolution of God.”

Walton Muyumba’s “The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism,” an original critical look at the work of Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and James Baldwin, is due out from the University of Chicago any minute now.

Steve Kellman multitasking: reviewing Breyten Breytenbach for The Quarterly Conversation, editing “An American in the Making,” the story of M. E. Ravage, who immigrated to the US at the turn of the twentieth century, for Rutgers University Press, and reviewing José Maria de Eça de Queirós’s “The City and the Mountains” for The Review of Contemporary Literature.