"Red Rover" is both the name of a children's game and a formless spirit, a god of release and permission, called upon in the course of that game. The "red rover" is also a thread of desire, and a clue to the forces of love and antipathy that shape ou...

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur....

After the publication of "Butcher's Moon" in 1974, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone". And readers waited. But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker's as bad...

The sixteenth Parker novel, "Butcher's Moon" is more than twice as long most of the master heister's adventures, and absolutely jammed with the action, violence, and nerve-jangling tension readers have come to expect. Back in the corrupt town where h...

After the bloodbath of "Butcher's Moon", the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone". And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed awa...

A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur's recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of thi...

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing th...

In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today's humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrumen...

A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his hetero...

"We got to talking" – so David Antin begins the introduction to "Radical Coherency", embarking on the pursuit that has marked much of his breathless, brilliantly conversational work. For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of perform...