THE
CURRENT ISSUE: RR/7
THE READING ROOM/7 features two
superb international firsts. In “Truce” & “Letter
to Saul Bellow” the acclaimed French novelist Frédéric
Berthet, in his first publication in English, pays a triple homage to Saul
Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and New York. In Jenny
Ballou’s lost memoir Spanish
Prelude: Café Revolutionaries, about a lost Spain, the
author is a stunningly lucid witness, on a level with Orwell, to the virtues
and drawbacks of the intellectual firmament in Madrid just before the birth
of the Spanish Republic.
Stanley Crouch’s Leona, a modern Molly Bloom,
in On This Night sifts
through jazz, the heat of sex, the history of New York and the history of
us all. Barbara Probst Solomon narrates in her novel The King of Paris the
hidden past of the Vichy years, and its consequences in contemporary Rabat
and Yemen. Mike Wallace continues his brilliant intellectual excavation of
New York started in his Pulitzer Prize Gotham, this time focusing
on “New York and the Nazis.”
David Evanier and Steven Schrader, their wit abounds,
report on the writer’s
life, while Derek Van Sickle, the author of Montana Gothic, takes
us on a Tom Sawyer bawdy adventure in My Pal Rinker. A different
jaunt is Alex Rose’s “In Praise of Tangents” on science
and the imagination. The Poetry Corner is well represented by the work of
Donald Gropman, Don Maggin, Alan Kaufman, Erik La Prade and Susan
Maurer.
In THREE x THREE: MEXICO/ KENYA/ ISRAEL three gifted novelists, Carmen
Boullosa,
Julie R. Obaso and Rebecca Rass, in myriad tonalities, braid place, language,
and evocative story telling. And in their memoir fiction Judy
Feiffer, April
Deller and Sarah Merchlewitz evoke the lives of three young women at the
exact moment when they plunge headlong from childhood to womanhood.
THE ART GALLERY showcases the art of William
Anthony,
David Newman and Lorraine Shemesh, while Alan
Kaufman and Erik LaPrade talk about art. Wendy
Mark’s
art is on the cover.
BACK ISSUES OF THE READING ROOM ARE AVAILABLE in fine
bookstores and online book sellers. Among the writers and artists represented:
Saul Bellow, Larry Rivers, Amos Oz, Juan Goytisolo, Stephen Dixon, Daphne
Merkin, Gonzalo Torné,
Alan Cheuse, Clancy Sigal, Norman Birnbaum, Gerald Holton, Joseph Roth, Toby
Talbot, Scott Snyder, Madison Smartt Bell, Kenneth Koch, John Updike, Carl
Watson, Julian Ríos, Fanny Rubio, Angel Vázquez, and Murzban
Fali Shroff, Stuart Schneiderman, Thomas McGonigle, Nuria Amat, John Buffalo
Mailer, José Saramago, Binnie Kirshenbaum and Robert Bly.
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Above: Richard Bellamy, January 1998.
Photograph by Erik La Prade.
Below: Announcement for Green Gallery Show, 1961.
Designed by Claes Oldenburg. 
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