Vol 4.1

Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 4.1: Arthur Boyle on Meridel Le Sueur, who was a communist—she said so herself; Carey K. Mott on the American art market, which is to say: on Lehman Brothers, tax strategy, Swiss freeports, and forged Etruscan bronzes. Then there’s Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon on Garth Greenwell’s novels about pain and the strange privacy of suffering. In a similar vein, Elvia Wilk dislocated her shoulder while sleeping, and from this misfortune emerged a corporation, a diagnosis, and a meditation on the condition of the free-lancer. Martin Dolan writes a rigorous, generous argument for why video games are the only medium where the key critical word is not “feels” but “acts,” with Blue Prince as his source “text.” Nicole Kaack wrote a case file for Don DeLillo’s Libra.

A conversation between Cleveland writers Hilary Plum and Caren Beilin, both with new novels out, discussing sincerity’s limits, gynecological crimes, discreditable narrators, and writing sick. Andrew Rihn watches a fight at a bleak morning hour and thinks about Duchamp, to whom an invisible boxing match was just as useful as a visible one. A.V. Marraccini with “Difficult Epigrams” on John Dee, Tycho Brahe, the Cumaean Sibyl, Agnes Martin, Fragonard, the Aztec obsidian mirror currently in the Met, a brass nose, and the apocalypse.

Fiction by Fabienne François Keck (two girls and a predator, set in motion in a movie theater in 1985), Swati Sudarsan (a glass house on a San Francisco hill, a Lab, a new girl digging through the trash), and Connor Fisher (twin brothers, their divans, and grids).

Poetry by Laura Jaramillo, Gabriel Palacios, Brendan Joyce, and Emily Bark Brown. A crossword by Natan Last.