NEW REVIEWS
Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History
"Mouto Sésé Seko said
'If you want to steal,
steal a little cleverly,
in a nice way.
Only if you steal so much
as to become rich overnight,
you will be caught.'"

Oscar Wilde in America
"America is the only country
that went from barbarism
to decadence without
civilization in between."

Bonobo Handshake
"The Congolese love bonobos
so much that they
are eating them up.
It's called,
in the vernacular,
bushmeat."

Chroma: A Book of Color
"The virus rages fierce.
I have no friends now
who are not dead or dying.
Like a blue frost
it caught them."

U. S. Grant
"We find Grant's
very words to be astounding, when
for instance, he writes that
the length of the war was
in some way 'providential."

With Elvis in Mexico
"It wouldn't be long
before he started humming and
the rest of us would join him ...
it was an honor to sing
with Presley."

Little Boy Blue
"I caught myself wondering,
was this some kind of
Hollywood ending, like
the feel-good coda
on a TV drama after
the last commercial break?"

Hudson River Panorama
"Oh, the Erie was a-rising,
And gin was getting low,
And I scarcely think we'll get a drink
Till we get to Buffalo."

Madre & I
"Instead of calling this
Madre and I perhaps
¡Mama Mia! would
have been more
to the point."

Great Reviews of the Past
Bryson's Dictionary of
Troublesome Words
"English became a magpie,
needing (for no good reason
except possibly naked avarice)
to steal nouns, adjectives,
verb forms and constructs
from every language on earth,
including Nilo-Saharan, Sino-Tibetan,
Dravidian, Oto-Manguean, and Tupian,
not to say the original Indo-European."

LETTERS
Nude Art
Edward Lear

MORE LETTERS
Ethel Merston
La Cuenca de Los Angeles

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Bible Banners
A Light that Reaches to Heaven

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
Two Days to Leave

ARTICLE
Great Articles of the Past
Writing
"Writers are jackals,
hyenas, asses even.
We steal everything but TVs.
Then we lie about it.
Lie, lie, lie, just to
make ourselves look good and
make everybody else look horrible.
No wonder most of us
are so poor."

READINGS
Beaning Mr. Kopex
"It sounded like
he was begging for mercy,
but of course if what
you are looking for is mercy,
high school isn't the place
for you anyway."

Spilling Seed
"Russell Hodge
appeared at this moment
to be having misgivings,
that or had forgotten
who Spooner was,
or couldn't make up his mind
how he wanted to
kill him."

POETRY
The Gifts of the Moon
"And it is for that reason,
cursed, spoiled, beloved child,
that I am now laying at your feet,
seeking in all of your person the reflection
of the formidable Divinity."

When We Were Countries
"Dress in black for a month.
Dress in black on my birthday every year.
Bring me flowers to make up for
the roses you didn't get me on my Sweet Sixteen."

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"

SUBSCRIBE
Help perpetuate honest, noisy, pesky book reviews.
With your $25 subscription, you get
a free copy of one or more of the titles from
Mho & Mho Works