Focus: Short Takes — January/February 2000

From Russia with Love
Robert L. McLaughlin reviews Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies by Ken Kalfus

House of Rue
Robert A. Morace reviews A House of Butter by Joanna H. Woś

Swept Away
Barbara Barnard reviews Where I Live Now: Stories, 1993-1998 by Lucia Berlin

“What Do You Have a Mouth with Teeth in It For?”
Bob Blaisdell reviews Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories by Rick DeMarinis

Little Things Mean A Lot
Jerome Klinkowitz reviews Sleep by Stephen Dixon

Nine-Inch Heels in Real Reel Time
Lance Olsen reviews Sex for the Millennium: Extreme Tales by Harold Jaffe

FEATURE: Mise-en-Scéne

Yanks in Euroland
An Essay by David Applefield

French Scene: What Shines?
An Essay by Pierre Furlan

FEATURE: Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Stay

The Kids Are All Right
Joan Frank reviews It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories edited by Janice Eidus and John Kastan

Living the Lame Dream
Joe Maynard reviews We Rock So You Don’t Have To: The Option Reader #1 edited by Scott Becker

FEATURE: Auden: Pro and Contra

The Pleasure of Myth, the Intrusion of History
Robert C. Jones reviews Later Auden by Edward Mendelson

Auden’s Copout
Fielding Dawson reviews De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Book Reviews

Lost Underworld
Michael McIrvin reviews Gray Air: Poems from Prison, 1983-1999 by Christopher Presfield

Semi-Permanent
Martin Tucker reviews Fluke by Martin Blinder, The Man I Never Wanted To Be by John Clayton, Whompyjawed by Mitch Cullin, and Rolling Thunder by William Simmons

Blessing Creation
Laurel Blossom reviews What Are Big Girls Made Of? and Early Grrrl: The Early Poems of Marge Piercy by Marge Piercy

Warhol in Words
Bill Morgan reviews ’66 Frames: A Memoir by Gordon Ball

Pas de Deux
Lorna Harbus reviews Collusion: Memoir of a Young Girl and Her Ballet Master by Evan Zimroth

Pataphysical Anarchist
bart plantenga reviews I Spit On Your Graves by Boris Vian and From Dreams to Despair: Integrated Reading of the Novels of Boris Vian by J.K.L. Scott

American in Paris
Barry Wallenstein reviews A Paris Year: Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931-1932 by Edgar M. Branch

Where Do Whites Fit In?
Cassandra Heliczer reviews From the Margins of Empire by Louise Yelin

The Myth of Amherst
Christina Milletti reviews Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

Blackberry Gelatin Prose
Matt Briggs reviews Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz

The Files of Exile
Paul Pines reviews City of a Hundred Fires by Richard Blanco

Hunted by the Black Dog
Patricia Kelly-Gallen reviews Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker by Susan Cheever and Singing Lessons by Judy Collins

Black Gothic
David G. Nicholls reviews Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History by Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr

Austrian Po Mo
Robert Dassanowsky reviews Leonardo’s Hands by Alois Hotschnig

From the Backlist

Clutch Shot
Sam Truitt reviews Clinch: Selected Poems by Michael Scholnick

Departments

Rants and Raves
Letters to the Editor

The Net