NEW TITLES
World Made By Hand
"One thing
the public doesn't get
about the housing debacle is
that it is not just
the low point in
a regular cycle ---
it is the end of
the suburban phase
of US history."

Blood River
"His journey to follow
in the footsteps of Stanley
may have been madness itself,
but there was a method to it ...
the knowledge that if
he ever got himself into hot water,
there, just a cell-phone call away,
was near-instant relief."

Up Against the Wall
"I went through
this stuff in the Sixties,
so I couldn't put it down,
even when we get to
the muddled meanderings
of the last hundred
pages or so."

Strand
"29,000 rubber duckies
spilled out of a container
in the middle of the Pacific
(most are still floating
around the vast ocean);
adventures with some
highly regarded scientists
in a launch in
the Straits of Juan de Fuca,
collecting 'whale poop.'"

This Man's Army
"The editor himself says
that the book is
not a masterpiece.
Compared to Wilfred Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, T. E. Hulme,
Rupert Brooke --- Wyeth is a
piece of cheese."

Best New American Voices 2009
"'If he wakes you up
in the middle of the night
with a knife to your throat,
call us.' Do Army psychologists
say things like that
about men returning
from Iraq?"

Old English Poems and Riddles
"McCully is not very taken
with Seamus Heaney's
version of Beowulf.
He says that many people,
'often, kind and even educated people,
seem to think that
Old English literature consists
of Seamus Heaney's translation.'"

Near Death in the Arctic
"With great sums of
money and endless manpower,
with great (and expensive) vessels,
they sailed off into the unknown,
came down with scurvy,
spent months entombed in the ice,
got their limbs nipped off by frost,
and, often, fought with
and murdered each other."

The Possession
"I no longer
have any desire to
find out the name
of the other woman.
But, warning:
I will decline up-front
the solicitude of any
potential informers."

Great Reviews of the Past
Snowstruck:
In the Grip of Avalanches
"One of the worst disasters
took place in 1916:
not in Alaska, not in
the Western United States,
not in the Swiss Alps ---
but in the trenches of WWI.
On December 12 and 13,
in just forty-eight hours,
six thousand soldiers
died in avalanches."

LETTERS
Carl Jung
Buddha

MORE LETTERS
Freeman Walker
The Øresund Fixed Link

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Slavery
Reymundo Sanchez
Why Writers Are Like They Are

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Me Is Friendly

ARTICLES
The Anatomy of a Review
Greed
"I was reading
Lady Chatterley's Lover
when I was knee-high
to a grasshopper;
Henry Miller was my dream.
I'm no prude,
but some of the goings-on
in Greed get too
hairy even for me."

Great Articles from the Past
Bonehead English
"His dreams were
wonderfully weird and
his life was a hoot.
Each weekend he would
tank up and go find
a hooker downtown or
head over to Mexicali
to get laid.
His exploits were sordid
and funny and equal
to the best of Richard Burton."

READINGS
Jean-Paul Sartre Meets John Huston
"Sartre, in his letters
to Simone de Beauvoir,
described Huston as perfectly vacant,
literally incapable of speaking to
those whom he has invited.
Evidently he didn't realise
that Huston was waiting for him
to catch his breath."

POETRY
Godzilla in Mexico
"Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die."

Hagar's Last Night in Abraham's House
"She cries. The master ordered
her out of the house today,
Witch, are you getting out
of my life or not?
Sarah, matron of the charity box,
kept egging him on:
Either you get rid of that girl,
or I'm getting a divorce."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

A PITHY SAMPLE
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"

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