Issue 18 Subscribe Here
Fall 2008
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Cover Photo Issue 18: 'Filmmuseum, Munich'
by Ornan Rotem

Arias
Pierre & Valentin TEMKINE--Where Do These Bodies Come From?

Texts
Henryk SKWARCZYŃSKI--Big Dog’s Tale
Don ASHER--Deuce
Michael HULSE--To My Father
Anis SHIVANI--Huntsville

Art
Robert WALSER--Brief Pieces on Painting & Walser on himself

Lives
Barrie COOPER

The Reader
Keith Botsford: New Fiction

PB's Notebook

With this issue we revert to the tabloid format of our beginnings: more timely, more frequent and more ephemeral – and cheaper too.

The Insert – Huntsville, by Anis SHIVANI – is a remarkable tale of how the citizens of Huntsville, Texas, react to the execution of a convicted murderer. In Texts, and as powerfully, jazz-man and San Francisco writer Don ASHER, in Deuce, tells the story of a young and ambitious tennis player and his relations with his pro and employer, relations complicated by a ghetto background and an attempted seduction. In Big Dog's Tale, from his novel Feast of Fools, the Polish novelist Henryk SKWARCZYŃSKI gives us the perspective of a young boy with his mother and her exchange of bordello services with Mr. Zagorski

In an Aria, Pierre and Valentine TEMKINE argue that Beckett's Waiting for Godot is anything but an absurdist text and that, in fact, it is closely related to Beckett's activities in the Resistance movement in France and to the Holocaust.

Robert WALSER (1878-1956), the Swiss writer best known for his novels, was also an assiduous critic of art and literature. In Art, we publish some of his polished reflections on Watteau and also a brief letter to his public: 'I would therefore wish that no one pay attention to me'.

Finally, the Anglo-German poet and translator, Michael HULSE, gives us a sequence of fourteen deeply-felt and lucid poems on the death of his father.

All that plus The Reader and Pierre Bayle's Notebook, the Editor's acidulous view of the current election campaign in the United States.