Review of Philippe Vasset, Script Generator;©®™, translated by Jane Metter, Serpent’s Tail Press, 2004.

A review by James Kohn.

Just as the film “Last Year at Marienbad” teased an earlier generation with its innovative and creative story-telling, so Philippe Vasset’s hyper-novel teases the modern-day reader of adventure fiction. For the chapters of this novel of intrigue are interspersed with pages taken from a presumed software product, the “Script Generator” of the title. (more…)

Red Hen Press, 2003.

A Review by Harriet Rafter.

You know the story: a man, or a family, but usually two people, wander through the California countryside searching for a job, a home, a community, a new life. They may ride in a jalopy, or on a horse, but typically they straggle on foot, though the deserts, or the mountains, or the central valley–those sites of potential plenty, which our heroes pray will yield them gold or glory or at least physical sustenance. (more…)

Eat Everything Before You Die: a Chinaman in the Counterculture; a novel by Jeffery Paul Chan. U. of Washington Press, 304 pp., $22.50 hardcover. ISBN: 0-295-98436-8

A review by George Leonard

Jeffery Paul Chan is the new Henry Miller; or Toni Morrison, take your pick. Miller, Morrison and Chan are prose poets, who construct their plots like serial monologs in chains of modernist set pieces.
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Beverly R. Voloshin

Postmodern philosophers offer some form of deconstructive or destructive critique and have, like Nietzsche earlier, included ethics as the object of corrosive critique. At the same time, there has been a turn toward ethics in the work of several of the postmodern philosophers, and, as I will show, this turn has been made largely within the terms of postmodern theory. (more…)

by Toni Mirosevich

Risk

risk: 1. exposure to the chance of injury or loss . . .
Greek rhiza, cliff, root (meaning to sail round a cliff)

Blue blade, the bow cuts the waves, straight-
edged, like a skate on ice, what’s the odds
she’ll topple? Survival at sea or a watery death,
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