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Despite images of subway vent winds cooing up Marilyn Monroe’s skirt, on an everyday basis, being a woman continues somehow to be both a vile and boring experience. Because supply exceeds demand then I tend to shy away from books by women who are not Patti Smith. I also am in possession of an unfortunate mind that first associates Louise Erdrich not with her prize winning 1984 classic Love Medicine, but with even the remote possibility that she is a  second year ‘minority author’ pick for suburban book clubs after whatever Toni Morrison title has been checked off (don’t shoot the messenger). That said, we had a copy of Erdrich’s latest, Shadow Tag, lying around and the cover was made of that soft plasticized paper that feels not just like velvet but like ice cream marketed as ‘velvet.’

Shadow Tag is about the dissolution of the marriage of a stalled graduate student, Irene, and her older painter husband, Gil. Both have Native American and white ancestry and a lot of the plot revolves around Gil’s obsession with possessing Irene and  if Gil is the breadwinner because his paintings bring in money or if he owes Irene and the Native community a debt because many of the paintings are of her in degrading sexual poses. Toni Morrison herself has been praised for making huge seemingly impossible issues of race and gender understandable through smaller, more domestic stories and I can see how yeah, actually, bite sized post-colonialism totally works.

There is much to love in this book, including a lot of sweet moments when Irene tries to understand how her children see the world and some really interesting philosophical looks at love and power. ‘I’m just food,’ says Irene. ‘What kind of food?’ asks Gil. ‘Fast food.’ Genius! On the other hand, I could have done without all the animal metaphors ( ‘You are the snake. You have struck a poison in my heart.’ Geez, Louise!)

What struck me about Shadow Tag and many other books about domestic disputes is that there is always a clear enemy, in this case the husband. Perhaps my reluctance to relate to ‘female-oriented’ or at least ‘female-marketed’ literature is that for many women the Enemy is He, and I have never found a tangible enemy in my own life (hence my Kafka Krush). Another thing I noticed is that other then small flashback scenes, there are only six characters. It could be a stage play and that may actually speak to the larger problem with many American families. Day to day our lives ressemble awkward lonely kitchen table scenes from Death of a Salesman more than they do the loud sprawling clan from The Godfather.  --Marina

New Directions is the publishing house started in 1936 by James Laughlin, at age 22. To make a very long story short, New Directions went on to become one of America’s great publishers and an indispensable boon to the modernist avant garde. ND published Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams. That’s the short list. ND is still around, and its solid-gold list is always being updated and reissued with fresh commentary by contemporary writers. Witness the recent reissue of William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, sporting a brand-new introduction by Rick Moody.

James Laughlin had to persevere through some extremely tough times, though, and he faced some abusive types. Wyndham Lewis wrote to him once: “Why don’t you stop New Directions, your books are crap.” Ouch. But old Wyndham Lewis was as wrong as wrong can be; fortunately for us Laughlin ignored him anyway.--Alex

The Believer is one of the magazines we carry on our ever bustier magazine rack.

Believer book reviews are insightful about not only the specifics of the book but why it might be important to a greater body of literature. In a new take on the  ’anonymous review,’ Justin Taylor was asked to invert the standard ‘anonymous review’ formula — if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice– whether positive or negative, wheter directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds: ‘No googling‘) and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out by a Sharpie.’

After his reading, Taylor found himself ‘freed from the tyranny of the preprogrammed response, set adrift, context-free, at sea with an alien test. Every reviewer–every reader–should hope to be so lucky.’

We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover or a person by their clothes, but I really like book covers and clothes and I like to distinguish between book covers I kind of like and book covers I love. Also, didn’t the author have some choice over the book cover just like I had some choice over the shoes I put on this morning? I guess judge people. . .within budget. 

Of that opinion is pop philosopher Chuck Klosterman (what?! I really like his book covers), who wrote (and based his whole career around the fact that) ‘ There are two ways to look at life . . .The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherantly connected. . . The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected . . . In and of itself, nothing really matters. The problem is that nothing is ever in and of itself.’

Does anything mean what it really means out of context? Is it wrong to judge a book by its cover or is it wronger to lack to judgement? Would the obviously gay guy from 10th grade have come out if he went to high school in San Francisco? Maybe this is just an existential question for a slightly snowy yet somehow warm winter day (If the snow doesn’t stick and only turns into puddles was it ever snow in the first place? etc., etc.,)

Oh yeah, the anonymous book was Book of Jokes by Momus. I guess sometimes there is a third option, that context matters more than the thing itself. --Marina