Category Archives: Books

Between Stations

Posted on November 9, 2019 by John Biscello

   I was on the subway platform waiting for the train when I spotted a thin girl in torn jeans and bright green tank-top walking in my direction. Her hair was a bushel of unruliness. As the girl drew nearer … Continue reading →

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The Factory

Posted on October 15, 2019 by John Biscello

Review of Hiroko Oyamada’s award-winning debut novel, The Factory. The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big business industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, … Continue reading →

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Surrealism in Paris

Posted on September 9, 2019 by John Biscello

Review of Sue Roe’s In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali A fish rides a bicycle into the Seine. The fish begins to drown and then remembers that it is a fish and starts to … Continue reading →

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Still of the Night

Posted on July 26, 2019 by John Biscello

It is like having a piece of hard existential candy lodged in your larynx while all around you voices demand the strictest means of geometry by which to constellate your semblance.   (Photo by Cindy Sherman)

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Devils in Daylight

Posted on July 25, 2019 by John Biscello

Review of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Devils in Daylight appearing in Riot Material. “I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, … Continue reading →

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Travelogue

Posted on July 10, 2019 by John Biscello

She never did go anywhere, you know? Some ghosts become totemic stand-bys for the lives they never led, gloaming potentialties that passed, in solemn wisp, from dream to dream, then fade.   (Photo by Cindy Sherman)

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At Present

Posted on July 9, 2019 by John Biscello

Everything dissolved anyway, was how she consoled herself. She would do something, she would plant yellow daisies in the garden first thing tomorrow morning, yellow seemed appropriate, yes, even though the idea of morning seemed far-off and left her feeling … Continue reading →

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Cabin Fever

Posted on July 7, 2019 by John Biscello

A getaway, he had reasoned brightly, it will be good for us, give us a chance to reconnect. Why did everything he said always sound perfectly rehearsed, a conviction born of rote directive? Was it the way he spoke, the … Continue reading →

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Soap Serial

Posted on July 5, 2019 by John Biscello

If someone would have told her it would be like giving birth to a checklist of domestic servitude and falsely fresh produce on a numbingly repeatable basis, she might have seriously pursued her childhood dream of running away with the … Continue reading →

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Curiouser and Curiouser

Posted on June 26, 2019 by John Biscello

Letter from Wonderland– Dear Miss So-and-So, Your husband injured himself chasing a young girl in fuzzy pink rabbit ears down a dark narrow hole. Do not expect him home any time soon. Yours Truly, A Secret Admirer.   (Photo by … Continue reading →

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