Focus: The Monstrous and the Marvelous — July/August 1998

The Monstrous and the Marvelous

Volume 19 Number 5
July-August 1998

FOCUS: The Monstrous and the Marvelous

An Introduction
Rikki Ducornet, Focus Editor

Inventing Unreality
Ann Lauterbach

Mytho-Immunity and the Fatherhood
Ben Marcus

Soap Opera
Harry Mathews

Freaks of Nature
Steven Moore

First Breath, Last Sigh
Rosamond Purcell

Art by Ramón Alejandro

FEATURE: Rebutting Rushdie

The Life and Death of Salman Rushdie
Rukmini Bhaya Nair

The Dilemmas of Writing in English in Postcolonial India
Pramod Mishra

FEATURE: Got My PoMo Workin’

Neo-Modernist Splatter-Gore
Freya Johnson reviews Rob Hardin’s Distorture

Parody of the Parodic
Eric Miles Williamson reviews Janice Eidus’s The Celibacy Club

Book Reviews

Linda Wagner-Martin reviews Charles Olson’s Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander

Tyrus Miller reviews Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1:1913-1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings

Adrian Zupp reviews Robert Peter’s Feather: A Child’s Death and Life

Louis McKee reviews Susan Shapiro’s Internal Medicine, Joseph Bathanti’s This Metal and Martin Tucker’s Attention Spans

Bob Blaisdell reviews Fred Bonnie’s Food Fights: Tales from the Restaurant Trade

Al Maginnes reviews Wesley McNair’s The Town of No & My Brother Running, and Dave Smith’s Floating on Solitude

Daniela Gioseffi reviews Ben Morreale’s The Loss of the Miraculous, and Debra Di Blasi’s Drought & Say What You Like

Leigh Harrison reviews Barbara M. Fisher’s Noble Numbers, Subtle Words

Charles Marowitz reviews David Mamet’s True and False: Heresy & Common Sense For The Actor

Andy Robbins reviews two works by Marilyn Krysl: Soulskin, and Warscape with Lovers

Jamie Hutchinson reviews Sascha Feinstein’s Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present

Chris Rutledge reviews Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

From the Backlist

Gordon Thompson reviews Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance: 1920-1940, edited by James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian

Frank Stewart reviews Nick Carbo’s El Grupo McDonald’s and Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry, edited by Nick Carbo

Departments

Picketing the Zeitgeist
“Collecting” Cultural Magazines’ Self-Retrospectives by Richard Kostelanetz

Rants and Raves
Letter to the Editor

The Net