Passionately intelligent essays lamenting the extent and enormous damage of the cover-up of 9/11 truth in American journalism and media.

The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking at a Time of Grave Peril

History

Larsen, Eric

Americas

Oliver Arts and Open Press

This "futuristic" and highly satiric novel is actually set, just like George Orwell's "1984," not in the future at all but in the present itself, a present that the author (again like Orwell) sets out to portray as it actually is rather than as people have grown accustomed to it in an unthinking acceptance. In "Topiary," the central character goes by the name of "Plantman." He earlier worked as writer for an enormous ad agency, but now, having switched careers from "death" to "life" and from "falsehood" to "growth," he is hired by a company called "Topiary Techniques" to water and otherwise nurture and care for the only green and living things in the great business towers of "The City," namely, the green plants that have been supplied to corporate directors by Topiary Techniques in order to bring some bit of life into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead cubicles and "offices" throughout The City. Partly Candide, partly the Thoreau of "Walden," partly Johnny Appleseed, and partly the free-associating mind of the highly literary novelist himself, Plantman "travels" both inwardly and outwardly, meeting all the city's most influential (and just as often, cruelly or blindly destructive) denizens. In the end, Plantman very nearly dies from a hideous disease symbolizing the power of The City's toxicity (both literal and moral) over the powers of the green, organic, and natural: That is, over the powers of "life." Still, a touch of hope does bless novel's end as Plantman sets forth on one last quest that may--if we're very, very lucky--save us all.

Topiary--A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Engel, A. Stephen

Literary

Millions of men served in the Army during the Cold War-many inside major American cities-in ARADCOM (Army Air Defense Command). Until recently, one of the Army's best kept secrets was that the men in the Nike-Hercules system were in charge of nuclear missiles ready to knock down fleets of Soviet planes or ICBMs should they attempt to attack the U.S. To those inside ARADCOM, though, the even better-kept secret was the one about duty in Korea-a country where anything went and where the officers and senior NCOs shut themselves away to wait for their 13 months to be over, leaving the business of running nuclear facilities to the lower enlisted men. You could almost say that duty in Korea was duty in a place where the inmates were running the asylum. Kimchee Days is about life in a Nike-Hercules battery near Inchon in the early 1970s, a part of the Korean Air Defense Artillery-or the ADA, which the men usually called "A Different Army." In its way, the book embraces the spirit of the 1970s, along with the lives, loves-and many other things-that came with that time. Welcome to the asylum.

Kimchee Days, Or, Stoned-Cold Warriors

Gatto, Timothy V.

Genre Fiction

On the back cover of THE BLUE RENTAL, readers will find these words- "Barbara Mor imagines Kantian 'nauseous allegories' growing out of a David Lynchian southwest American desert, a place that becomes a habitat of the psycho political terrestrial reality we all now inhabit-& the rent is very high. . . ." Readers may ask, exactly what is this place, this place where "the rent is very high"? And they will discover, as they begin reading not the work of this enormously gifted and artistically painstaking writer-readers will find that this "place" is nothing less than our own world-"the psychopolitical terrestrial reality we all now inhabit." It is the world we live in, the world we have made for ourselves, the world we have inherited, the world we are responsible for-in both senses, first, responsible for being the crazed and malignant "creators" of it, and, second, responsible for doing whatever can still be done to save and salvage it, to pay the rent due to it in order to keep it-and all things and creatures upon it and in it-from death, ruin, madness, destruction, endgame. No less than matters such as these constitute the high subject and impassioned material of Mor's literary art-an art, like all the greatest of its kind, that never rests, takes a break, steps off the road, but that, at every single moment, reaches and then reaches again for the utmost and the absolute. And that is the way each and every one of us must now live our daily lives-looking at and reaching for the absolute. That is how we must live if we care that Earth, our blue rental, may and can and will survive. Barbara Mor brings us a literary art commensurate to the nature and extremity of the time and world we all now dwell in. None of us should miss it.

The Blue Rental

Mor, Barbara

I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague: My Life in the Bush Era of Ghosts

ENGEL, ADAM

You fall quiet when you hear a great truth, and each one of Helen Tzagoloff's riveting poems in Listening to the Thunder lets you enter that silence of significance. From pictures of World War II Russia in a very young child's eyes to images of post-war America from an adolescent's view, to the perspective of a sophisticated woman and mother, these poems are piercingly clear, without judgment, in their stunningly deadpan lines. Huge upheavals funnel down into a single artifact, say, an abandoned apron, in Tzagoloff's unforgettable mixture of innocence and experience. The poems are searing, funny, moving and as charged with atmosphere as the moments before and after thunder. Molly Peacock

Listening to the Thunder, Poems

TZAGOLOFF, HELEN

Poetry

Han Glassman was  born in Korea and grew up under the Japanese occupation, where she was forced to speak Japanese or be beaten, and suffered from starvation. As a result o fthe Second World War and  the Korean War, she lost her two elder sisters and her entire college class. In America, she met a Romanian Jew named Frederic, a Holocaust survivor and refugee named Frederic, a Holocaust survivor and refugee from Communism who shared her love of music and literature. Their wartime experiences, commitment to family, and education held them  together through a difficult immigrant experience. Though she lost him recently, they had two daughters and three grandchildren named after their beloved father and grandfather. Han also has a daughter in Korea and two grandchildren there. She writes in  English so that people in the West can understand what happened in Asia during these wars. This book is the product of a family, written by a  woman who lost her own first family and then built a new one. Consisting of lyrical poetry interwoven with prose, it is a twentieth-century story: A story of war, loss, immigration, and then the gradual transition to a new world of  electronics, computers, acceleration in the pace of everything--and loneliness. The book has been a  life-long work of the author's, edited first by her husband and then, as they grew up and matured, by her daughters. With its deft hand and unfailing delicacy of image, the book is reminiscent of haiku. Its author has always believed that a family is like a person. If one person is gone, what remains is like a person without a hand, or a heart.

Autumn Lamp in Rain

Glassman, Han

Take a sip anywhere from this pool of enigmatic yet crystal-clear words. What is it, you'll ask, this wonderful, alluring flow of thought and feeling? Where did they come from, these delicious words and beguiling images? They come from the workings of a mind-perhaps they are the workings of a mind, a mind transcribing itself in these poems. Alan Salant is many things: student of philosophy, student of math history, inquirer into the infinitely odd nature of human society and the dizzying quality of what it is actually to exist, to be alive. This poet's explorations are surreal, comic, deep, towering, and allusive, effortlessly moving from Dostoevsky, Gauss, and DNA to personal laundry. ("Sometimes that's what I think / And other times I have trouble figuring out / Which shirt to wear") Here is a new kind of poetry, an intellectual feast to nourish mind, belly, and human heart: One morning I segmented reality. It objected, of course, Only partly on religious grounds. But I have entire structures of mind, Brewed in three dreams of Descartes Beside the soft Danube By a warm stove.

The Expedition Sets Out

Salant, Alan

The pieces here are neither poetry nor prose: They are unique in form, since their form is determined by the uniqueness of their author's purpose. "The novel is dead and poetry has been marginalized. But literature must live if we are to retain what remains of our humanity, ' or the noblest traits of it, Engel says. 112 pp.

Cella Fantastik

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Larsen stretches conventional fiction's reach with this story of a character whose childhood and coming-of-age consist of his gradual internalizing of history-as he puts it, his coming to understand "the mysteries of space and time." At first, he sees only glimpses of life-through the briefly-opened "windows" of eyesight in early childhood. Later on, everything begins serving as windows into the past-objects, locations, landscapes, the town he's born in, the people in it-even his aging great-aunts Marie and Lutie, whose origins are back in the 19th century.   Through small things like a visit from his great-aunts one afternoon in 1944 (when he's four years old), a blimp cruising overhead in 1946, goldfish hovering beneath the surface of a pond, the sound of a train whistle in the night, Malcolm Reiner comes to understand that things can be related "horizontally," then also "vertically"-relationships that, when combined with the element of time itself, reveal history-that is, as life, followed by the absence of life-to be a web of such intricate complexity that it can't ever be understood.   And yet Reiner dedicates his life to exactly this "study of the mysteries of space and time." In his "studies" he finds a sweep of time includes the history of West Tree, Minnesota; of the "Epoch of Walking"; and of his own "years of perfect seeing," the period when, living on a farm outside West Tree, he's able, with a poetic vividness rare in fiction, to sense and see what America once was.

The End of the 19th Century

Contemporary

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