RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities --- Complete Table of Contents, Issues 250ff

Issue #260
www.ralphmag.org/IH/indexIH.html
mid-Spring 2015
Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum
Our Cheatin' Wives
The Grand Prince of Moscow
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine:
Letters to RALPH
Why O Why?
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Nice Collection from
Twenty Years of This Magazine's
"Paradox of the Month"
The Possibilities
Kaui Hart Hemmings
(Simon & Schuster)
A Novel about a Boy's Death,
and the Young Girl Who Appears at the Back Door,
Saying She is the To-Be Mother of the Son's New Child
K is for Killer
Sue Grafton
(St. Martin's Griffin)
Number 11 in the Apparently
Endless Series of Detective Stories
by Grafton
Zen Encounters with Loneliness
Terrence Keenan
(Wisdom)
An Alcoholic Zen Master
Relates the Details of
His Addiction
The Empire of the Dead
Tracy Daugherty
(Johns Hopkins University)
Seven Short Stories
Five about a
Lonely Man in New York City
The Footloose American Trail Across South America
Following the Hunter S. Thompson
Brian Kevin
(Broadway Books)
Following Thompson's Trail in
South America Fifty Years Ago
10:04
A Novel
Ben Lerner
(Faber & Faber)
An Up-and-Coming
Novelist in New York
with Hurricane, Pregnancies, and Thoughts of
Writers Writing about Writing
Hell and Good Company
The Spanish Civil War
And the World It Made
Richard Rhodes
(Simon & Schuster)
Heroism, Sacrifice, and
the Outsiders in the Midst
of that Sad War
Dataclysm
Who We Are When We Think
bNo One's Looking
Christian Rudder
(Crown)
Some Scary Facts about
What You Give Up When
You Join Others Online
Seduced by Modernity:[G]
The Photography of Margaret Watkins
Mary O'Connor, Katherine Tweedie, Editors
(McGill-Queens University Press)
One of the Great "Modernist" Photographers
from the American Jazz Age
Georgia O'Keeffe and
New Mexico[G]
A Sense of Place
Barbara Buhler Lynes
Leslie Poling-Kempes
Frederick W. Turner
(Princeton University Press)
The Testy O'Keeffe Being Testy
to the Snobs of Santa Fe
Kosher Goyim
Dr. Phage
b Article
A Plan to Convert the Goyim
by Means of the Best Food
on the Planet
When Rats Find Cats Alluring
Toxoplasma gondii
Diane Ackerman
[Reading]
A New and Devilish Plague Particular
to Cats and Kangaroos
Eskimos and
The Long Winter Darkness[G]
Jane Brox
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
How Eskimos Survived without
Lights and Electricity
Baudelaire 1939
Baudelaire Hamburger
Marcia
Richard Brautigan
Poems
The Beat Master in
Three of His Best
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #261
www.ralphmag.org/II/indexII.html
Late Spring 2015
Kosher Goyim
Thieves in Wheelchairs
Offer from the Libyan Government
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Letters to RALPH
Fifteen All-Time Hits
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
The Reviews, Articles, Poems and Readings
That Get the Most Repeat Business
From Our Readers
On Immunity*
An Inoculation
Eula Biss
(Graywolf Press)
A Writer's Personal Trip to Discover if
It Is Safe for Her to Inoculate Her Son
Philip Larkin
Life, Art and Love
James Booth
(Bloomsbury)
One of those Excruciating Long Overly Dull
Microscopic Examinations of an Author's Life
(As If the Secret of His Art Were Hidden There
Our Lady of the Nile*
Scholastique Mukasonga
(Archipelago)
An Utterly Charming Peek at a Girl's School
In Present-Day Rwanda with (Surprise!)
Little Blood, Lots of Love
Dead Water
Ann Cleeves
(Minotaur)
An Endlessly Drawn Out Murder Mystery
In, of All Places, the Shetland Islands
The Birds of Pandemonium
Life Among the Exotic and the Endangered
Michele Raffin
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
Raffin Cannoit and Will Not Leave a
Sick or Nutty Bird
From Moving into Her Place There in
the Santa Cruz Mountains
Doing It at the Dixie Dew
Ruth Moose
(Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)
Another Bed & Breakfast Murder ---
This Time in the Deep South
The Queen's Caprice
Stories
Jean Echenoz
(New Press)
Seven of Echenoz'
Fiction/Non-Fiction Explorations
Of History, Engineering, and the Outskirts of Paris
The Bird Skinner
A Novel
Alice Greenway
(Grove Press)
A Surly Old Boozer Meets an Old Friends
Lovely and Out-of-this-World Daughter
American Creation[G]
Triumphs and Tragedies at
The Founding of the Republic
Joseph J. Ellis
(Random House Audio)
A Can't-Stop-Listening Reading
Of the Early Days of the Republic
Lanterns on The Prairie[G]
The Blackfeet Photographs
Of Walter McClintock
Steven L. Grafe, Editor
(University of Oklahoma)
A Treasury of Photographs from the Late 19th Century
The Huwoman Race
Mike Ervin
[Article]
Another Sly Reading of Would-Be History
by the Sly and Comic "Crip" Writer
Perceptions of Risk
Vs. the Real Thing
Eula Biss
[Reading]
How You and I Misrepresent
the Least Dangerous
And Forget the Most Dangerous
The Louisiana Purchase[G]
Joseph J. Ellis
[Reading]
What Historian Ellis Calls
"The Most Consequential
Executive Decision in American History"
Mr. Pou & the Alphabet
The Hell Poem
John Berryman's Poetry
One a Poem for His Son,
Another a Poem about His Madness
Letter to the Dead[G]
Affonso Romano DeSant'Anna
[Poetry]
A Poem about the Fact that
Northing at All Has Changed
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #262
www.ralphmag.org/IJ/indexIJ.html
Early Summer 2015
Poole's Paradise
Viruses
When Is a Rejection Just Too Quick?
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Twelve Great Readings
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
The Readings That Get
The Most Repeat Business
From Our Readers
Fire and Movement*
The British Expeditionary Force
And the Campaign of 1914
Peter Hart
(Oxford)
The First Four Months of WWI,
As Seen through the Eyes of the
New Young Recruits
Under the Tripoli Sky
Kamal Ben Hameda
(Peirene)
A Boy on the Streets of Tripoli,
Surrounded by Magic, and Magic Women
The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price*
Purveyor of Superior Funerals
Wendy Jones
(Europa Editions)
A Young Funeral Director
Finds Himself Caught with
The Wiles of Women
(That He May Have Brought on Himself)
One Day I Will
Write About This Place
A Memoir
Binyavanga Wainaina
(Graywolf Press)
A Trip through the Languages (and Oddities)
Of Modern-Day East Africa
Into the War
Italo Calvino
(Mariner Books)
The Early Days of WWII in San Remo
As Experienced by the Young Fascists
Transoceanic Lights
S. Li
(Harvard Square Editions)
They Come from China to the Promised Land
And All They Found Was
Nag-Nag-Nag (and 16-Hour Work Days
Time Present and Time Past*
Deidre Madden
(Europa Editions)
The Normal Buckley Family Turns Out
To Have Strange Delusions (and Odd Children)
Eight Mile High
Jim Ray Daniels
(Michigan State University Press)
Normal Workaday Families in Michigan
Turn Out to Have Some Violent Surprises
All-American Poem
[G] Matthew Dickman
(American Poetry Review)
A Young Eccentric Poet
Shows Himself to Have Some
Surprises in the Form (and Truth) Department
Timothy[G]
Or, Notes of An Abject Reptile
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Josephine Bailey, Reader
(Tantor --- 5 CDs)
Gilbert White, the Naturalist's Naturalist
From Two Centuries Ago, as
Observed by His Turtle
Your Super-Ego Is
Just an Old Nag
Adam Phillips
[Reading]
How the Super-Ego Can Be
Compared to Don Quixote's Horse, Rocinante
Radio:
Our Golden Age
L. W. Milam
[Article]
Memories of Being Carried Aloft
By the Sound of Late-Night Radio
The New Telephone and
The New Airplane at War
Peter Hart
[Reading]
A New War ---
And New Means of
Transmitting Information
Tito
Aaron Cometbus
[Poem]
Stuff in Your Apartment
That the Landlord Should Never See
The History of the Minstrel Show
Richard Garcia
[Poem]
A Free Verse Memory of
Some Deplorable Entertainments
Shiva Goes Surfing
Off Newfoundland
Francis S. Pickins
[Poem]
The Great Warm Mother
In the Cold Northeast
Issue #263
www.ralphmag.org/IK/indexIK.html
Mid-Summer 2015
Another Letter from Warren Buffet
Edward Everett
Twisted Spoon Press
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Several Dozen Odd Letters
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Wonderful (and Freaky) Letters
That Have Come into Our Offices
Over the Past Twenty Years
The Insect Cookbook
Food for a Sustainable Planet
Arnold van Huis, Henk van Gurp, and Marcel Dicke
(Columbia University Press)
Things You Should Be Eating Right Now
(Grasshopper, Mealworms, Thrips, Bedbugs, Roaches)
So Our Children Can Survive and Thrive
Cultural Encyclopedia
Of the Penis
Michael Kimmel, Christine Milrod,
And Amanda Kennedy, Editors
(Rowman & Littlefield)
The Weenie, in High (Somewhat Tedious) Relief
Turing
Pioneer of the Information Age
Jack Copeland
(Oxford)
The Inventor of the Computer
And the Big Question:
Did the British Government
Drive Him to Suicide?
Time Ages in a Hurry*
Antonio Tabucchi
(Archipelago Books)
A Small Selection of Several of the Author's Stories
Doctors Without Borders
Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams
Of Médecins Sans Frontières
Renée C. Fox
(Johns Hopkins University Press)
A Sociological Study of the
Pioneering Medical Group That Has Helped
In Some of the Most Decimated
Parts of the World
White Hunger
Aki Ollikainen
(Peirene)
The Finnish Famine of 1866 - 1868
I Refuse
Per Petterson
(Graywolf Press)
A Novel of Two Men of Norway
One Rich, One Poor,
Both Unhappy
The Chair
Poems
Richard Garcia
(BOA)
A Hundred of So of What Our Reviewer Calls "Box Poems"
The Emperor, C'est Moi
Hugo Horiot
(Seven Stories Press)
Adventures in Inexpressiveness
By Our Young (and Feisty) Hero
Hidden Witness[G]
African-American Images from
The Dawn of Photography
To the Civil War
Jackie Napolean Wilson
(St. Martin's Press)
The Discover, by Our Writer,
Of a Treasure-Trove of
Ancient Photographs
Broken Land[G]
Poems of Brooklyn
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Michael Tyrell, Editors
(New York University Press)
A Bracing Collection of
Poems on Brooklyn
From the 17th Century to Now
The Evening
The World Ended
The Phantom
[Article]
Memories of Some Unforgettable
AA Meetings (in the Basement)
The Trial of
Fatty Arbuckle[G]
Wanda Felix
[Article]
The Trial of the Century
(From Ninety Years Past)
Fighting with Father
Pers Petterson
[Reading]
A Classic Battle
Out of Oedipus
Eugène Atget's Paris
& Walter Benjamin
Alexander Gelley
[Reading]
Classic Views of the Streets of Paris
To a Nose
Francisco de Quevedo
[Poem]
The Hooter, Examined
Strawberry Pie
Xia Yu
[Poem]
The Sweet (and the Sad) of Love
Death Is Sitting
At the Foot
Of My Bed [G]
Oscar Hahn
[Poem]
How Not to Sleep Well at Night
Issue #264
www.ralphmag.org/IL/indexIL.html
Late Summer 2015
Pictures of neuropsychological syndromes
The man sitting on the car
Letters We Never Finished Reading:
Making a killing in Afghan treasure
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Fifteen Great Detective Stories
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Some of the Great Murder Books
That Have Come to Us since 1994
Rust
The Longest War
Jonathan Waldman
(Simon and Schuster)
A Study of the Unseen Disaster
(Creeping Over Us As We Speak!)
Mayumi and The Sea of Happiness*
Jennifer Tseng
(Europa Editions)
A Young Love (Very Young) with
The Town Librarian and the High School Student
(Who Loves Lollipops)
The Small House at Allington*
Anthony Trollope
Read by David Shaw-Parker
(Naxos Audiobooks)
One of those Heavy (and Very Funny) Books
Out of 19th Century England
My Depression
A Picture Book
Elizabeth Swados
(Seven Stories)
You Think You Got Problems?
Wait Until You try This "Comic Book"
Blue-Eyed Boy
A Memoir
Robert Timberg
(Penguin)
They Literrally Burned Off His Face in Vietnam
And He Survived to
Live with It, and Even Prosper
The Hollow Land*
Jane Gardam
(Europa Editions)
A Family of Cumbrians Meet
An Equally Droll Family from London
Papyrus:
The Plant That Changed the World
From Ancient Egypt to Today's Water Wars
John Gaudet
(Pegasus Books)
The Earliest Paper in All
Its Ever-Varying Forms
Hummingbirds*
Ronald Orenstein
(Firefly Books)
Many of the Almost 350 Species
Represented in the Luscious Book
The Reluctant Matador
A Hugo Marston Novel
Mark Pryor
(Seventh Street Books)
A Fairly Big Turkey about
Murderous Doings in Barcelona
Blind Moon Alley*
John Florio
(Seventh Street Books)
A Startlingly Good Mystery Set in Prohibition Philadelphia
The Chrysler Building[G]
Creating a New Icon
Day by Day
David Stravitz
(Princeton Architectural)
The Original Construction Photographs Revealed
Tropical &
Subtropical Trees[G]
An Encyclopedia
Margaret Barwick
(Timber Press)
Over 2000 Trees Described and Shown
--- Many in Color
'Til the Well Runs Dry*
A Novel
Lauren Francis-Sharma
(Henry Holt)
We Loved This One So Much That
We Decided to Review it Again (with Added Pith)
Chopped Liver
Mike Ervin
[Article]
A Crip's Demand that the Many Rip-Off Joints
Take Notice of the Disabled Too
Bisphenol-A
and Aluminum Cans
Jonathan Waldman
[Reading]
The Truth About What You Are Drinking
With Your Coke or Beans
Papyrus and the Crocodiles
John Gaudet
[Reading]
A Trip Down the Nile Seeking Papyrus
(And Crocodiles)
Autumn
T. E. Hulme
[Poem]
One of the First Imagist Poems
The Meaning of Life
From The Mahabharata
Peter Brook
[Drama]
Thoughts on Creation (And Love)

Issue #265
www.ralphmag.org/IM/indexIM.html
Early Fall 2015
Talking Cows
Trotsky and the Ice Pick and
the Twitter/Instagram generation
Letters We Never Finished Reading
Motherless Babies and Widowers in Your Country
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Fifteen Great Detective Stories
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Some of the Great Murder Books
That Have Come to Us since 1994
Fifteen Great Travel Books
And a Couple that Bombed
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Some of the Great Travel Books
That Have Come to Us since 1994
Seven Steps to Train Your Mind
Gomo Tulko
(Wisdom)
The Many Ways to Involve one
in the Practice of Buddhism
The Wright Brothers*
David McCullough
(Simon & Schuster)
The (Often Surprising) Studies and Designs
Of the Two Brothers from Dayton, Ohio
Uniforms
Bettina Hubby
(Ice House)
The Whimsy of the Official Uniform
Shown, Often, Without Bodies Attached
Judge This
Chip Kidd
(TED/Simon & Schuster)
A Man Who Has Designed Many a Book Cover
Tells Us the Goods and Bads of Representative Salesmanship
Aquarium
David Vann
(Atlantic Monthly)
Young Caitlin Falls in with the Fishies
And Gets Excoriated by an Irate Mother
The Dead Lake
Hamid Ismailov
(Peirene)
A Young/Old Musician of Kazakhstan and the Decimation
Of a Community Under the Shadow of the Bomb
A Higher Form of Killing
Six Weeks in World War I that Forever
Changed the Nature of Warfare
Diana Preston
(Bloomsbury)
Bombing Cities, Using Gas in the Trenches
And Sinking Passenger Ships on the High Seas
The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
(Brilliance Audio)
What Would Have Happened if the Japanese
And Nazi Germany Had Won WWII
Wil Usdi
Thoughts from the Asylum
A Cherokee Novella
Robert J. Conley
(University of Oklahoma Press)
A Most Brilliant Cherokee Goes Bonkers
At the End of the Civil War
Those Who Leave and
Those Who Stay
Elena Ferrante
Europa
Two Young Ladies from the Slums of Naples
Grow Up and Grow Apart
H. L. Mencken on
American Literature[G]
S. T. Joshi, Editor
(Ohio University Press)
They Call Him the Sage if Baltimore;
Better, the Snarl of Baltimore
White Waters and Black[G]
Gordon MacCreagh
(Chicago)
Too Many Scientists Seeking
The Headwaters of the Amazon
The Sargasso Sea
Of Motherboards
Dr. Phage
[Article]
The Parts of the Computer that
Go Bump in the Night
Dog Eating
Mountain Lion
Matt Sumell
[Reading]
What to Do if Your Favorite Dog
Goes Missing in the National Park
Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya
Meets the KKK
Steve Stern
[Reading]
What Happens to the Fiery Cross
When the Good Rabbi Appears on the Scene
From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old[G]
Hanan Mikha'il 'Ashrawi
[Poems]
Poetry from Palestine and Israel
The Spider Sonnet
John Whitworth
[Poem]
The Solution to Pollution is to
Stop Ingesting Spiders
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #266
www.ralphmag.org/IN/indexIN.html
Early Fall 2015
The Vivisection Mambo
I, I I & I I I
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles, Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Fifteen Great History Books
And a Couple of Stinkers
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Some of the Great History Books
That Have Come to Us since 1994
Tales of Remarkable Birds
Dominic Couzens
(Bloomsbury)
Thirty-nine of the Rarest and Most Beautiful
Birds from All over the World
Making Nice
Matt Sumell
(Henry Holt)
An Obnoxious Son-of-a-Bitch that the Reader ---
perhaps --- Would Prefer not to Read about
Falling in Love
With Hominids*
Nalo Hopkinson
(Tachyon)
Several Weird Tales --- Well-Executed but Sinister
--- of People of Another World if not Our Own
Hitting the Streets
(Courir les Rues)
Raymond Queneau
Rachel Galvin, Translator
(Carcanet)
Oddly Appealing Short Tales from
The Streets of Paris
Dangerous When Wet
Jamie Brickhouse
(St. Martin's Press)
A Memoir of Growing Up as Mama's
One and Only, Who Somehow
Managed to Survive
The Meat Racket
The Secret Takeover of
America's Food Business*
Christopher Leonard
(Simon & Schuster)
A Terrific Study of Oligopolistic Tendencies
In the American Meat Market
A Brief History of
Portable Literature
Enrique Vita-Matas
Anne McLean & Thomas Bunstead Translators
(New Directions)
An Odd-Ball Picture of Duchamp, Benjamin, et al
And Their Search for the Most Portable Literature of Them All
H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald
(Grove Press)
A Look at the H for Highly Proclaimed
Novel which Our Reviewer Opined May Have
Slighted the Goshawk and the Reader as Well
Wondering Who You Are*
Sonya Lea
(TinHouse Books)
A Stunning Tale of Losing Your Love in the Operating Room
And Finding Him Different (but Great)
--- Lurking Right Next Door
The Cartel
A Novel
Don Winslow
(Knopf)
A Novel History Novel Proving that We've All
Lost the War on Drugs
Emanuel Swedenborg's
Journal of Dreams[G]
Commentary by
Wilson van Dusen
(Swedenborg Foundation)
In Which Dreams from 250 Years Ago
Tell Us More about the Interpretation of Dreams
And Somewhat Bit Less Than the Dreamer
Isaac Bashevis Singer and
The Lower East Side
Bruce Davidson, Photographer
(Mead Art Museum/
University of Wisconsin)
A Terrific Story Interlaced with
Terrific Photographs
Loving One Who
Thinks He Has
Forgotten You[G]
Sonya Lea
[Reading]
Making Love with One Who Can't Remember
Ever Having Made Love Before
The Refugees and the Picnic
Jon Gallant
[Article]
A Vivid Reincarnation of the Refugee Story from 1989 ---
Where Lost People Were Much More Honored than Those in 2015
God Must Be Female[G]
J. P. Donleavy
[Reading]
A man Who (Perhaps) Loves
And Remembers Too Much
Four In The Morning
Dame Edith Sitwell
[Poem]
"The Allegro Negro Cocktail Shaker"
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #267
www.ralphmag.org/IO/indexIO.html
Mid-Fall 2015
The Wrong Icehouse
Bladder Bags
Crowned Cranes
A General in the Chinese Army
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Beavers in Florida
Plato and Platypus
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Twelve Neglected Novels
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Some of Great Novels
That Have Come to Us
Over the Last Two Years
Idyll Threats
Stephane Gayle
(Seventh Street Books)
A Cop from the Big City
Resigns to Solve Murders in Idyll CT
I Can Give You Anything But Love
Gary Indiana
(Rizzoli)
A Kind of an Autobiography Seeded with Some Reportage
And No End of, ulp, The Beast. With Two. Backs.
The Liar's Wife
Four Novellas
Mary Gordon
(Brilliance Audio)
Four Attempts to Resolve the Usual Catholic Paradox
Favored by the Author
The Ville Rat
Martin Limén
(Soho)
A Visit with Detectives in South Korea
With Good if not Overwhelming Local Color
Like a Beggar*
Ellen Bass
(Copper Canyon)
Poetry of the
"You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" School
Woodpeckers of the World*
A Photographic Guide
Gerard Gorman
(Firefly)
1,000 Photographs of the
239 Piciformes Worldwide
Enabling Acts
The Hidden Story of How the Americans
with Disabilities Act Gave The Largest U. S. Minority
its Rights
Lennard J. Davis
(Beacon Press)
An Exhaustive Study of the
Formation of the ADA
The Moonstone*
A Romance
Wilkie Collins
(Naxos)
A Knockout Audio Version of the Famed
Thriller from 1868
More Harm than Good [G]
What Your Doctor May Not
Tell You about Common Treatments
And Procedures
Alan Zelicoff, M.D.
Michael Bellomo
(Amacom)
A Fascinating Study of the Treatments
That May Leave You Worse Off
Help Your Dog Fight Cancer [G]
What Every Caretaker Should Know About Canine Cancer
Laurie Kaplan
(Kaplan)
More Than You May Ever
Want to Know about
The Illnesses of Your Pet
Letter from Seattle
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Thoughts on Twitter, Twaddle, Twerp, and Trump
Along with the Vandalism of the Glassy
Works of Dale Chihuly
The New Silence
Mark Morford
[Reading]
A New (And Alarming)
Silence on the Bird Front
Benny's Scratch Pad
The House of the Dealer
Gary Indiana
[Reading]
The Volcanic Trash From
Out the Front Door
The Burning Ghats
India, 1900
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
[Reading]
Scenes from Early Vistas of India
A Head Full of Maggots
Reconstructing the Crime Scene
Wilkie Collins
[Reading]
A Great Scene of Rebellion in the Ranks
from The Moonstone
Ordinary Sex
Ode to the Fish
Ellen Bass
[Poetry]
Great Scenes of Love (And Fish)
From a Master Poet
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #268
www.ralphmag.org/IP/indexIP.html
Late Fall 2015
Claude Debussy
Five Duffers & Five Million Dollars
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Twelve Great Pix
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Photographs that Appear with Our Reviews
That Seem to Generate the Most Interest
The Essential Ginsberg*
Allen Ginsberg
Michael Schumacher, Editor
(Harper Perennial)
An Excellent Collection of Ginsberg's
Poems, Essays, Criticism, and
Best of All, His Astute Interviews
Peterson Reference Guide to Owls
Of North America and the Caribbean
Scott Weidensaul
(Houghton Mifflin)
Thirty-nine Species of Owls of United States,
Canada, Mexico, and various islands of the Caribbean
With Hundreds of Fine Photographs
The Shift
One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives
Theresa Brown
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
Full Time Nurse on the Oncology Ward ---
With Some Agonizing Moments (And Surprises)
Walking with Abel*
Journeys with the Nomads
Of the African Savannah
Anna Badkhen
(Riverhead)
A Year with the Cow-herders of Mali ---
Filled with Some Astonishing Moments of Beauty
God's Bankers
A History of Money and
Power at the Vatican
Gerald Posner
(Simon & Schuster)
A Heavily Annotated Study of
The Finances of the Mother Church
The Hare with Amber Eyes
A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund de Waal
(Vintage)
A Wonderful History of a Family
(With a Great Collection of Netsuke)
The Martian*
Andy Weir
R. C. Bray, Reader
(Brilliance Audio)
A Wonderful Reading of the Now-
Famous Classic of Survival
(Where None Should Survive)
The Vienna Melody*
Ernst Lothar
(Europa Editions)
A Classic Novel of the Old School:
A Vienna Family from 1890 - 1945
Solo
A James Bond Novel
William Boyd
(Vintage)
In Which a Veteran Writer Tries to ---
And Succeeds in --- Out-Fleming Fleming
The Story of the Lost Child
Elena Ferrante
(Europa Editions)
Elena and Lila in the Very Last (Alas!)
Novel of Their Life Together (and Apart)
The Lower River
A Novel of Africa
Paul Theroux
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
You Go to Africa and Think You Got It
Only to Find Out That It's Got You
Crossroads
Women Coming of Age in Today's Uganda
Christopher Conte, Editor
(Crossroads)
Fourteen Women of a Coffee Cooperative of Uganda
Tell What It Is Really Like to Be Lively (and
Active) in 21st Century Africa
The American People
In World War II [G]
David M. Kennedy
(Oxford)
A Superb History of 1941 - 1945
Filled with a Series of Unbelievable
(And Forgotten) Events
Another Day of Life[G]
Ryszard Kapuściński
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
The Polish Journalist Who Went Anywhere ---
In This Case Angola ---
When All the Others Were Bailing Out
How the Stop the War Coalition Coalesced
Jon Gallant
[Article]
How the STWC Viewed
The End of Communist Rule
(And Their Take on America's Role)
Alice's Adventures Under Ground
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Douglas Cruickshank
[Article]
How to Access the Real, True Copy of
The Original Alice in Wonderland
Playing Under Lenin,
Lenin and the Cheese Sandwich
Gary Shteyngart
[Readings]
Two Short Excessively Funny
Readings from Little Failure
Good News (and Three Others)
Matt Walker
[Poems]
Four New Poems of the New
Neo-Realist School
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #269
www.ralphmag.org/IQ/indexIQ.html
Early Winter 2015
Shostakovich's Symphonies and Soviet Politics
"I have wittenessed youre heathens picture of our Savior."
Signs and Machines: Maurizio Lazzarato
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Eleven Supposed Reviews
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Older Reviews that May
Defy the Scepticism of Our Editors
And Strain the Good Will of Our Readers
The Trace*
A Novel
Forrest Gander
(New Directions)
The Fearsome Story of Two Gringos
Lost in the Chihuahua Desert Amongst
A Band of Narcotraficantes
Symphony for the City of the Dead
Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
M. T. Anderson
(Candlewick Press)
The Evolution of Shostakovich's Music
Amidst Soviet Censorship and Harassment
Coming Ashore
Catherine Gildner
(ECW Press)
An Unabashed Yank Intellectual
In Oxford, Cleveland, and Canada in
The early Seventies
Beauty is a Wound*
Eka Kurniawan
(New Directions)
The Classic Epic Transferred to
Indonesia with a Full Cast of Ghosts,
Revolutionaries, and Whores
Blackass*
A Novel
A. Igoni Barrett
(Graywolf Press)
An Unemployed Man in Kenya
Is Suddenly, Overnight, Transformed
Into a Honky in Traffic-Filled Lagos
Moonshine, Monster Catfish,
And Other Southern Comforts
Travels in the American South
Burkhard Bilger
(Arrow Books)
Tall Tales Direct from
The Moonshine Stills, Cat Fish Spawning
Grounds and Cock Fight Rings
Iris Murdoch
As I Knew Her
A.N. Wilson
(Arrow Books)
The Famed Writer Dissolving
Into Alzheimer's as Told, Faithfully
by Her Writer Husband
The Milli Vanilli Condition*
Essays on Culture in
The New Millennium
Eduardo Espina
(Arte Publico)
A Variety of Essays --- Improbable, Astonishing ---
From a Fresh New Voice out of
The Wilds of Montevideo, Uruguay
The ALC We Do Not See
Africa's Invisible Art, Literature & Culture
Douglas Cruickshank
[Article]
Writings, Books, Exhibits, Collections
Designed to Prove that Africa Is
More than a Pernicious Basket-Case of Starvation,
Ignorance, and a Warring Post-Colonial Nightmare
American Windmills[G]
An Album of Historic Photographs
T. Lindsay Baker
(University of Oklahoma)
A Collection of More than 200 Photographs
Of the Great Driver/Mover of
19th Century Plains America
The Wisdom of Wilderness [G]
Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature
Gerald G. May
(Harper/SanFrancisco)
A Christian Psychiatrist Tells of
His Own Mystical Experiences
Nights in the Pink Motel [G]
An American Strategist's Pursuit of Peace in Iraq
Robert Earle
(Naval Institute Press)
Earle, Somewhat of a Misfit Himself, Tells of His Own Bizarre Adventures
In the Far East Reaches
Of the Second Bush's Administration
Not Rabies, Baby, But Baby Scabies [G]
L. W. Milam
[Article]
One Man's Pursuit of a Cure
For The Seven-Year Itch
The Clemson Cripmas Party
L. W. Milam
[Article]
And His Suggestions for How
A Disgraced Fraternity from the Old South
Can Redeem Itself
The Seige of Leningrad
Matthew Tobin Anderson
[Reading]
900 Days of Starvation
In the Freezing Days of
Early WWII
The Liquid Country of Memory
Eduardo Espina
[Reading]
When a Tsunami Becomes
A Symbol of Water, Japan, and
"the Stimulus and Disorder of Acceptance."
Water As Literature
Eduardo Espina
[Reading]
And When Virginia Woolf, Hart Crane, and
"A visually Inaugural Territory" Become One
"Good Girl,"
"What Do Women Want?"
and "You Don't Know What Love Is"
Kim Addonizio
[Poetry]
Four Contemporary and Powerful Poems<
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #270
www.ralphmag.org/IR/indexIR.html
Mid-Winter 2015 - 2016
T. S. Eliot Sticks It to Geo. Orwell
A Letter to Philip Glass
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Twelve Dynamite Books from
The Last Days of 2015
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Some books from the late year
that received our much-coveted *star*
--- being a book of some merit.
Hardcore Zen*
Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and The Truth about Reality
Brad Warner
(Wisdom)
Zen Isn't What You Think; and What's More,
This So-Called Enlightenment Is
A Confounded Let-Down --- So Don't Bother.
But Do It!
The First Bad Man*
A Novel
Miranda July
(Scribner)
A Giantess Invades Her Home
And then a Tiny Babe. Zounds!
Words without Music*
A Memoir
Philip Glass
(Liveright)
This Glass Pretends He's a Composer
So He Can Drive Taxi and Plumb
--- And Write a Dynamite Memoir
The Argonauts*
Maggie Nelson
(Graywolf)
Friendly Essays on Sex-Change Operations and
Having Babies and Chatting with the Babe In Utero
The Looking-Glass Sisters
Gøhril Gabrielsen
(Peirene)
Two Very Chilly Ladies Living in the Northernmost
Part of Norway --- and Trying to Figure Out a Way
to Get Rid of Each Other
Wall Flower
A Life on the German Border
Rita Kuczynski
(University of Toronto Press)
She Was But a Child When the Ugly Fence Went Up
--- And She Spent the Next Twenty Years Depressed
(In the Arms of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)
How to Live Well with
Chronic Pain and Illness
A Mindful Guide
Toni Bernhard
(Wisdom)
Imagine Being Struck Down in a Doctor-Resistant Truma
That Drains YourEnergy, Your Well-Being, and even
Your Desire to Be With Friends and Family
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
(Spiegel & Grau)
This Slim, Everyone-Loves-It-Tome
Shows Itself to Be Filled with Insight
(And Way Too Much Ennui)
We Were Brothers
Barry Moser
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
This Somewhat Famous Illustrator Tells Us
All about His Crappy Childhood with Brother Tommy
The City of Falling Angels[G]
John Berendt
(Sceptre --- 2005)
The Word's Most Famous City Has Its
Ups and Downs (and Can Get Downright Stinky Too)
Human Rights in African Prisons[G]
Jeremy Sarkin, Editor
(Ohio University Press)
A Roam through the Shadow Side of
Living with All the Stops Pulled Out
A Sense Sublime[G]
Richard Quinney
(Borderland Books)
A Puzzling Story that Includes Meister Eckhart, William Wordsworth,
Wendell Berry, Lau-Tzu, and the Texas Zen Master, Willie Nelson
The Guise of Another[B]
Allen Eskens
(Seventh Street Books)
A Detective and Drago Basta ---
"A Coldblooded Veteran of the Balkan Wars"
The War Reporter [B]
A Novel
Martin Fletcher
(Thomas Dunne Books)
All the Reasons You Could Ever Possibly Need
As to Why Your Should Never Got to Serbia
The Music of Gold
Philip Glass
[Reading]
A Visit to the Serra Pelada Gold Mine in northern Brazil
A Contrarian Philosopher in East Berlin Rita Kuczynski
University of Toronto Press
The Proposed Ballet Drawn from
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Dirty Artists & The Clean Rich
Joyce Cary
[Reading]
That Formidable Con Man and Artist Gully Jimson
At Loose Ends in the Land of the Rich
Starfish
Eleanor Lerman
[Poem]
Floating, Floating Down the River
Millions of Us Lucky Starfish
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #271
www.ralphmag.org/IS/indexIS.html
Late Winter 2015 - 2016
The (Welcome) Absence of Arizona
To Purchase a Work of Art from RALPH
An Important Letter to RALPH
From Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve Board
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Twelve Great "Mystical" Books and Readings
from Our First Twenty-One Years
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Twelve Interesting Books and Readings
Having to Do with Zen, Buddhism, "Eastern" Mysticism,
and Western Spiritualism.
Project Animal Farm
An Accidental Journey into the Secret World
of Farming and the Truth about Our Food
Sonia Faruqi
(Pegasus Books)
Stuff You Don't Want to Be Reading
While You Are Chowing Down on KFC
or a MacBurger
The Gambler's Apprentice*
H. Lee Barnes
(University of Nevada Press)
Willie Bobbins Goes from Being a Low-Level
Mexican Cattle Rustler to a Fast Man with the Cards ---
All in One Entrancing Volume
Chutzpah!
New Voices from China
Ou Ning and Austin Woerner, Editors
(University of Oklahoma Press)
Fifteen Stories from the Defunct Chutzpah! Magazine
--- Showing Many of the Predilections of Today's Young Chinese Writers
The Blue Guitar
A Novel
John Banville
(Knopf)
John Banville Being John Banville with
The Usual Thieving, Swiving, and Adultery
A Cat, a Man, & Two Women
Junichiro Tanizaki
(New Directions)
The Man Who Brought The Tale of Genji to Japan Eighty Years Ago
--- This Time on the Cat that
Destroyed Two Marriages
Wide Awake
Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond
Suzanne Lummis, Editor
(Pacific Coast Poetry Series)
112 New Poets on Smog, Freeways,
Dope, Love, Passion, and the Jurassic
The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake
A Samuel Craddock Mystery
Terry Shames
(Seventh Street Books)
A Murder in the Texas Panhandle ---
With the Loveable Old Sheriff
(and His Cows)
A Kind of Compass
Stories on Distance
Belinda McKeon, Editor
(Tramp Press)
Seventeen Stories --- Which May Have Everything
(Or Nothing) to Do with "Distance"
The Curse of Jacob Tracy*
Holly Messinger
(Thomas Dunne Books)
A Delightful Romp with Spooks and
Werewolves from the Old West ---
With a Cowboy Who Could Care Less
The Cairo Affair
Olen Steinhauer
(St. Martin's Press)
Murder in a Restaurant in Budapest
Leads Us Back to Egypt during Arab Spring
A Passion to Win[G]
Sumner Redstone and Peter Knobler
(Simon & Schuster)
Some Reflections on the Story of Redstone's Life,
along with New Aging and Personal Troubles
A Chronicle of Jazz[G]
Mervyn Cooke
(Oxford)
Reflections on the History of Jazz and Herbie Hancock,
Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong
The Way We Wore[O]
A Life in Threads
Robert Elms
(Picador --- 2005)
Stories of How Clothes Made the Young Men
Who Made a Fashion Statement with their Lives
Disgrace[O]
J.M. Coetzee
(Vintage --- 2009)
Schadenfreude --- the Decline and Fall of a Professor
Who Just Didn't Know How to Stop
The Genesis of Sex & Broadcasting
Lorenzo W. Milam
[Article]
The Genesis of the Book from 1972 on
Building a Radio Station for the Community
Where the Fake Spiritualist
Meets the Real Spiritualist
Holly Messinger
[Reading]
A Riotous Account of a Seance Where
The Cowboy Does All the Work
Three Poems from Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond
Suzanne Lummis, Editor
[Poetry]
Three Modern Poems from Young Writers of Los Angeles
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[O] = Books from Past Years Reviewed
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #272
www.ralphmag.org/IT/indexIT.html
Early Spring 2016
Odd Friendships [Among Animals]
Russian Artists under Stalin
Getting Mooned by God
From Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve Board
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Twelve Interesting Reviews and Readings
From the Last Twenty-One Years of RALPH
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Twelve Interesting Books Treating with Subjects Ranging from
Obituaries from the New York Times to
Poems about Parenting Grown Children to
Medical Care During the American Civil War
The Guilty*
Stories
Juan Villoro
(George Braziller)
Stories from the Yucatán, Oaxaca, and Mexico City
Tram 83*
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
(Deep Vellum Publishing)
The Bittersweet Experience of Urban Africa
Everything to Nothing*
The Poetry of the Great War, Revolution,
And the Transformation of Europe Geert Buelens
(Verso)
The Poet Turned into
A Man of Action Between 1914 and 1918
Bull
And Other Stories
Kathy Anderson
(Autumn House Press)
Thirteen Mind-Bending Stories ---
Some Way Beyond the Pale
American Candide
Mahendra Singh
(Rosarium Publishing)
Voltaire's Seminal Novel
Transformed into America of
Reality Television and Televangelists,
Venal Businessmen and Cheating Bankers
Hot Milk*
A Novel Deborah Levy
(Bloomsbury)
Levy Mixes it Up with A Mother, Her Daughter
And the Love of the Almería Coast
Jonas Salk:
A Life
Charlotte DeCross Jacobs
(Oxford)
The Man Who Created the Vaccine
Made Very Human (and Very Sad)
The Living Bird
100 Years of Listening to Nature
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Photographs by Gerrit Vyn
(Mountaineers Books)
Over Two Hundred Birds Pictured,
Described, and Given Fearful Notices
Fear and the Muse Kept Watch*
The Russian Masters --- From Akhmatova and Pasternak to
Shostakovich and Eisenstein --- Under Stalin
Andy McSmith
(The New Press)
The Great Writers, Musicians, and Film-Makers
As Terrorised by Stalin and the Soviet System
Greening Death
Reclaiming Burial Practices and
Restoring Our Tie to the Earth
Suzanne Kelly
(Rowman & Littlefield)
The New Funerary Movement ---
That Protects the Environment and
Our Love and Respect for the Newly-Deceased
Martinique --- Snake Charmer[G]
Martinique --- Charmeuse de Serpents
André Breton
(University of Texas Press)
The Dada Master En Route
To the United States in 1940
Letter to D[G]
A Love Story
André Gorz
(Polity)
The Existentialist Revealed
As a Fearful Self-Loathing Worry-Wart
American Copia[G]
An Immigrant Epic
Javier O. Huerta
(Arte/Publico Press / University of Houston)
How to Fall in Love with
Shopping in American Supermarkets
Mark Twain in Hawaii
Douglas Cruickshank
[Article]
How Samuel Clemens Found Himself
In the Sandwich Islands
Another Stinky Dog Story
R. P. Warren
[Reading]
The Governor in a Photo-Op Finds Himself
In the Arms of a Dog with Terrible Halitosis
Child Soldiers in Literature
David M. Rosen
[Reading]
The American Revolution and Civil War
As Proving Ground for Boy-Soldiers
Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico
Andy McSmith
[Reading]
The Mad Director Toying with
The Powers That Be in Stalinist Russia
Olives, Her Long Illness
Donald Hall
[Poetry]
Two Great Poems --- One on Youth,
Another on a Lingering Death
Pangur Bán[G]
My Cat
Anon
[Poem]
A Treasure in Verse Drawn from
A Friar's Manuscript from the 9th Century
In St. Paul's Monastery in Bodensee
[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[O] = Books from Past Years Reviewed
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention
Issue #273
www.ralphmag.org/IU/indexIU.html
Mid-Spring 2016
American Candide
Images intégrées
Odd Letters from the Past
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Fifteen Great Animal Books
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Fifteen Interesting Books About Animals ---
Some Loving (and Licking) ---
Others with Definite Violence Afoot
Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination
From Patriots to Victims
David M. Rosen
(Rutgers University Press)
The Stories of Armies through the Ages ---
More often than not,
Filled with Children Well Below Seventeen
Dinner with Buddha*
A Novel
Roland Merullo
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
Rinpoche on the Road with
His Very American "Brother-in-Waw"
The Etymologicon
A Circular Stroll Through
The Hidden Connections of
The English Language
Mark Forsyth
(Berkley Books)
A Very Funny Look at the Origins,
The Uses, and the Misuses of Our Very Odd Language
Why Walls Won't Work*
Repairing the US-Mexico Divide
Michael Dear
(Oxford University Press)
A Penetrating Look at
The Pretend Divide between
Our Two Countries
A Kind of Dream

Kelly Cherry (Terrace)
A Baker's Dozen of Stories
About Love and Family and
Dogs Who Come Back Lead Us Home
Perfect Lives
Stories
Polly Samson
(Bloomsbury)
Eleven Stories about Piano Tuners and
Ladies in Tune (and in Love)
The Viceroys (Verso)
Federico De Roberto
(Verso)
"The rotten, greedy core of Sicilian feudalism"
in a novel of Italian "Verismo."
Wild by Nature
From Siberia to Australia ---
Three Years Alone in
The Wilderness on Foot
Sarah Marquis
(Thomas Dunne/St. Martins)
Ms Marquis in an Extended, Tortured,
Trekkie Selfie for Sarah Marquis
Rain Dogs*
A Detective Sean Duffy Novel
Adrian McKinty
(Seventh Street Books)
A Won't-Leave-You-Alone Mystery
Set in a Dark Castle in Carrickfergus
My Bright Midnight[O]
A Novel
Josh Russell
(Louisiana University)
A Love Triangle Set in the Miserable 1930s
and 1940s in Lovely Louisiana
The Moneymaker[O]
Janet Gleeson
(Bantam Press --- 1999)
The Life and Times of the Great (and Greedy) John Law
City Requiem, Calcutta[G]
Gender and the Politics of Poverty
Ananya Roy
(University of Minnesota Press)
An Honest (and True) Look
At Life in Modern-Day Calcutta
My War Gone by,
I Miss it So[G]
Anthony Loyd
(Penguin)
The Truth of those "Little" Wars in
Bosnia, Servia, Croatia
Twentieth Century United States Photographers[G]
A Student's Guide
Kristin G. Congdon
Karas Kelley Hallmark
(Greenwood Press)
One of those Books Where the Pictures Speak
Louder (and Better) than the Words
A Conversation with Screenwriter-
Author Ronald Harwood
Douglas Cruickshank
[Interview]
An Extended Conversation with the Director of
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Lunch at the Roadside Café
with Volya Rinpoche
Roland Merullo
[Reading]
Having Lunch with a Proto Buddha in a
Greasy Spoon in North Dakota
A Journey with Virgil
Kelly Cherry
[Reading]
A Trip though the Divine Comedy
With a Dog Named Virgil
Borders and Passports and RFID
Frances Saunders
[Reading]
How You and I Have Voluntarily
Set Ourselves Up to Be Traced
Every Moment, Every Day
Bean Soup
Or a Legume Miscellany
Philip Paradis
[Poem]
In Classical Praise of the Musical Fruit
Men As Trees, Walking
William Greenway
[Poem]
Seeing through the Glass, Darkly
Cow Worship
Gerald Stern
[Poem]
In Praise of Bovine Love
Issue #274
www.ralphmag.org/IV/indexIV.html
Late Spring 2016
Junky Old Cars
Our Favorite War Books
Getting Rid of Arizona Once and for All
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Let's Examine What's Left of Your Brain, Please
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Eighteen Interesting Books, Readings, Poems
And Articles About Psychotherapy
Monticello in Mind
Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson
Lisa Russ Spaar, Editor
(University of Virginia Press)
His Religious Thoughts, His 18th Century Rationality,
His Ability with Words, His Love of Poetry . . .
and the Supposed Children by His slaves.
Tales from the Couch*
A Clinical Psychologist's True Stories of Psychopathology
Bob Wendorf, PsyD
(Carrel Books)
A Charming Clinical Therapist with
Dozens of Fascinating Patients
Poetry of Resistance
Voices for Social Justice
Francisco X. Alarcón
Odilia Galván Rodríguea
Editors
(University of Arizona Press)
Over a Hundred Poems about
Arizona's New Laws Directed at "Illegals."
The Battle for Room 314
My Year of Hope and Despair
In a New York City High School
Ed Boland
(Grand Central)
A Year of Teaching at Union Street School,
on New York City's East Side.
Best New Poems --- 2015
50 Poems from Emerging Writers
Tracy K. Smith, Editor
(University of Virginia Press)
Quite a Few Abstract-Expressionist Poems
In Gratitude*
Jenny Diski
(Bloomsbury)
Cancer of the Lymph Nodes, Fibrosis of the Lungs and
Dying and Death (On the Final Pages)
The Timid Cabbage*
A Poem by Charles Krafft
Illustrated by Femke Hiemstra
(Sympathetic Press)
Supposedly a Poem about Brassica
In Reality a Riff on Lutheranism
Hair
A Human History
Kurt Stenn
(Pegasus Books)
A Thousand Things You Might Not
Want to Know about Your Hair
Travels in the Interior of Africa[G]
Mungo Park
(Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)
One of Those Nutty Colonialists Wandering through 1795 Gambia
To Trace the Course of the Niger River
My 'Dam Life[G]
Three Years in Holland
Sean Condon
(Lonely Planet)
Everything You Need to Know about
Why You Don't Want to Live (and Work)
in Amsterdam
Mao Zedong[G]
Jonathan Spence
(Viking/Penguin)
A Terrific Study of Mao --- that Sounds Like
An American Up-from-the-Bottom Tale
Edward Weston[G]
Photographs from the Getty Museum
Brett Abbott
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
Dozens of Shots from One of the Master
Photographers of the Middle of the 20th Century
Getting Rid of Arizona
(Once and for All)
C. A. Amantea
[Article]
All the Reasons We Should Force Mexico
To Reclaim that Wretched State
C'est Absurde
Le Pacte des Loups
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Review of an Impossibly Paradoxical Movie
Paris' Hairy Bottom Street
Graham Robb
[Reading]
Odd Names Given to the Streets in Beaubourg
The Perfect Baby
Polly Samson
(Bloomsbury)
What Happens if You Find Your
New Kid Is Well (Cough) Not Exactly Gorgeous
Arachnophobia
Jenny Diski
(LRB)
Terror in Face of the Chance Spider
Isabel's Corrido
Martín Espada
(University of Arizona Press)
Un Mariage de Convenance
Lo Prohibido
Renato Rosaldo
(University of Arizona Press)
Arresting the Children of the "Illegals"
Ghost Town
24 Hours B4 Arizona's SB 1070
Gerardo Pacheco Matus
(University of Arizona Press)
Leaving Town Before
They Declare You An "Illegal"
Issue #275
www.ralphmag.org/IW/indexIW.html
Early Summer 2016
Fenugreek
Fiddling Around in
Handel's "Orlando"
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Our Favorite Wars
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Fifteen Interesting Books, Readings, Poems
And Articles About the Killing Fields
Red Cavalry*
Isaac Babel
(Pushkin Press)
The Writings of the Brilliant Bolshevik
War Correspondent from the Crimea, 1920
Do No Harm
Stories of Life, Death,
And Brain Surgery
Henry Marsh
(Thomas Dunne / St. Martin's)
An English Neurosurgeon Talks about
The Scariest Part of
Working on Your Brain
The Sonoran Desert
A Literary Field Guide
Eric Magrane
Christopher Cokinos
Editors
(University of Arizona Press)
A Charming Visit (with Poetry and Pictures)
To One of the Hottest Places on Earth
The Abundance
Essays Old and New
Annie Dillard
(Brilliance Audio)
One of America's Great Stylists
With a Dozen or So
Old (But Good) Articles
No Picnic on Mount Kenya
Felice Renuzzi
(MacLehose Press)
Three Italians Escape from a POW Camp
To Climb Mount Kenya
(And Then Return)
Someone Is Watching Joy Fielding
Read by Christina Traister
(Brilliance Audio)
The Story of a Rape - - -
And What It
Does to the Psyche
Unexpected Journey
A Physician's Life in the Shadow of Polio
Lauro S. Halstead, M. D.
(Amazon)
After Developing Polio in the Early 50's
Halstead Goes to Medical School and
Becomes One of the World's Experts on Rehabilitation
Flying Blind*
One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn,
Making Peace with Authority, and
Creating a Home for Endangered Bats
Don Mitchell
(Chelsea Green)
Two Old Hippies Move to Vermont
And Become Saviors to the Indiana Bat
Norwood[O]*
Charles Portis
(Simon & Schuster)
The Works of Portis Are Designated
To Be Among the Most Pure of
American Novels
The Naked and the Dead[G]
Norman Mailer
(Picador USA)
One of the Best Novels of WWII Revisited
Taking Haiti[O]
Military Occupation and the Culture of
U. S. Imperialism 1915 - 1940
Mary A. Renda
(Chapel Hill)
Another Tale of America's Self-Proclaimed
Role in Saving the Heathen World
from Itself
Happy Baby[G]
Stephen Elliott
(Picador)
An Elegant Presentation of
One Man's Need for Pain
Viols and Rackett
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Three Americans
Who Taught Us to Love
Medieval and Renaissance Music
Trauma
Henry Marsh
[Reading]
A Conference of Neurosurgeons
Deal with a Patient After a Trauma
To His Brain
Dust
Annie Dillard
[Reading]
Things You Only Suspected - - -
But Never Knew - - - about Dust
How to Kick a Duck[G]
Ed Zern
[Reading]
An Instructive Reading on
The Mauling of Innocent Ducks
Bomber's Moon
Mike Harding
[Poem]
Reflections of the Mass Bombing of Germany During WWII
Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands
(The Seven Commandments of Joe Louis)
Declan Ryan
[Poem]
Joe Louis and His Fight with Primo Carnera
Issue #276
www.ralphmag.org/IX/indexIX.html
Mid-Summer 2016
Halstead's Syndrome
Blue People
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Our Favorite New Books
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Dozen or So of The Best
New Books from the Early Months of 2016
Gaudeamus Killitur
Solving the Problem of
On-Campus Guns
Jon Gallant
[Article]
Need for a Hitman
In the Groves of Academe
Inventing a Better Mousetrap*
200 Years of American Industry in
The Amazing World of Patent Models
Alan & Ann Rothschid
(Maker Media)
750 New Inventions as Registered
In the U. S. Patent Office 150 Years Ago
One Wild Bird at a Time
Portraits of Individual Lives Bernd Heinrich
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
A Passionate Love
For the Wild Birds of Maine
The Word Detective
Searching for the Meaning of it All
At the Oxford English Dictionary
John Simpson
(Basic Books)
Bringing the OED into the Electronic Age
Heroes of the Frontier
A Novel
Dave Eggers
(Alfred A. Knopf)
A Mother and Her Two Children on the Run to Alaska
The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering
Jeffrey Rotter
(Metropolitan Book)
A Mindless Future in America
Overdiagnosed
Making People Sick
In the Pursuit of Health
H. Gilbert Welch, M.D. et al Sean Runnette, Reader.
(HighBridge Audio)
The Way the New Medical Testing Machines
Are Turning Most of Us
From People into Patients
Hitler, Mussolini, and Me
A Sort of Triography
Charles Davis
(The Permanent Press)
Turning the Two Dictators into Comic Figures
Prayer Warriors[G]
The True Story of a Gay Son, His Fundamentalist,
Christian Family and the Battle for His Soul
Stuart Howell Miller
(Alyson)
The Childhood of a Gay Activist
Been There, Done That[G]
Eddie Fisher / David Fisher
(Thomas Dunne Books)
The Real Skinny on Being America's Hearthrob
The Million Dollar Mermaid[G]
Esther Williams
(Simon & Schuster)
The Real Skinny on Being America's Siren
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED . . .
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Student Activists and Their Elaborate Demands
Happy Baby[G]
Stephen Elliott
(Picador)
A Chicago Prison Novel Abetted with a
Strange PTSD: the Need to Suffer (as if He Were Back in Prison)
My Sister
L. W. Milam
[Article]
A Story of Polio and
A Death in the Family
Frogs' Legs and BB Guns
Barbara Holland
[Reading]
The Total Innocence of Childhood in America, 1945
Viking Breath
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
[Poem]
How does it feel to be the Cultural Attaché
for the North Pole?
In Our Stairwell
Gennady Alexeyev
[Poem]
"As for humankind, we should not
laugh at it but mourn it."
Living in a Whale's Belly
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
[Poem]
The Happiest Years of Jonah's Life
Beiing the Ones he Spent in
the Belly of a Whale
Issue #277
www.ralphmag.org/IY/indexIY.html
Late Summer 2016
Catherine Gildiner's Coming Ashore
Hitler, Mussolini and Me
The Men With Broken Faces
The Best Dictionary and
The Word "Callipygian"
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Astonishing Letters from the Past
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Collection of a Dozen or So of
The Best Or Oddest Letters
To come into this Magazine
Artrage!
The Story of the BritArt Revolution
Elizabeth Fullerton
(Thames & Hudson)
An History of Some of the Most Bizarre, Unexpected,
Deranged, Demented, Obnoxious, and (Sometimes)
Funny Art to Come out of England
Tiger Milk*
Stefanie de Velasco
(Head of Zeus)
Two Volatile Middle Eastern Fourteen-Year-Olds
Wired Up on the Streets of 2010 Berlin
Reading from Behind
A Cultural Analysis of the Anus
Jonathan A. Allan
(University of Regina Press)
Eight Poems, Films, Books and Stories Deeply Anal-yzed to
Gauge the Profundity of Pleasure Available in
That Place Where the Sun Don't Shine
Arthur & George
Julian Barnes
(Brilliance Audio)
The Meeting of Two Figures from Nineteenth Century
England - - - George Edalji and Arthur Conan Doyle for
The Freedom of the Former, the Latter to Become a Sherlock
The Walls of Delhi*
Three Novellas
Uday Prakash
(Seven Stories Press)
Three Great Stories out of India Concerning
Corruption, Honor, Passion and Kafkaesque Shenanigans
All This Gold Hurts My Mouth
Katherine Leyton
(Icehouse/Goose Lane)
Feminist Poetry - - - with Vengeance - - - from Canada
All Is Not Forgotten*
Wendy Walker
(St Martins Press)
A Psychotherapist Turns Deceptive, Conniving
And Scheming (To Shield His Family)
Garden Insects of North America[G]
The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs
Whitney Cranshaw, Editor
(Princeton)
2,000 of the Scary Beasties Given Ample Showtime
Of Two Minds[G]
Tanya Luhrmann
(Vintage)
The Training, Practice (and Imperfection)
of American Psychology
An American Summer[G]
Frank Deford
(Sourcebooks Landmark)
An Exceptionally Vulgar Novel about
A Young Lady in an Iron Lung
Getting Old and Hoary
L. W. Milam
[Article]
What It's Like When the Grad Students
Send You a Ten-Page Questionnaire on Something Your Did
(and Forgot) Decades Ago
Ultrasound & Fury
Natalie Angier
[Reading]
What to Do When the Doctors Tell You that
Your Child Will Be Born Severely Handicapped
My Favorite Chickens
L. W. Milam
[Reading]
Raising Strange Looking Birds
from What They Call the Fancy
A Special Present for Sister Angelica
C. A. Amantea
[Reading]
A Present for the Saintly Nuns Who
Work in the Far Trenches of the Desert
A Petition on Behalf of Saddam Hussein
Rev. A. W. Allworthy
[Reading]
A Petition Filed Long Ago to
Spare Saddam Hussein's Life So
He Could Be Tortured by Graduate Students
This Beautiful Pool
Henry James
[Poem]
A Poem Drawn from the Novelist's Prose
Lower Forms of Life
Photograph of Mother
Katherine Leyton
[Poems]
Two from All the Gold Hurts My Mouth

Issue #278
www.ralphmag.org/IZ/indexIZ.html
Early Fall 2016
Christian/Holiness vs.
All This Gold Hurts My Mouth
American Candide
Patricia Smith Poetry &
Carlos vs. Lolita
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Eighteen Great Books of Photography
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Collection of a Dozen-and-a-Half of
The Best Books
on Art or Photographs
The Mindful Writer
Dinty W. Moore
(Wisdom)
Fifty-eight mots from
Fifty-Eight Writers on Writing
A Song to My City
Washington, D. C.
Carol Lancaster
(Georgetown University Press)
One Person's Somewhat Biased
View of Our Center of Government
Show Me All Your Scars
True Stories of Living with Mental Illness
Lee Gutkind, Editor
(In Fact Books)
Twenty People Who Suffer from a Number of
Mental Difficulties Tell Us What It's Like
Lithium Jesus
A Memoir of Mania
Charles Monroe-Kane
(Wisconsin)
One Who "Hears Voices" Explains
What That Is Like
Concrete Carnival*
Danner Darcleight
(The Permanent Press)
One Who Is Serving "Twenty-Five Years to Life"
Explores, in Detail, the Culture of Living in the Joint
Don Juan*
A Satiric Epic of Modern Life
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Jonathan Keeble, Reader
(Naxos)
Seventeen Cantos from 1825
Read Expertly by a Master
Hurricane Street
Ron Kovic
(Akashic)
The Author of Born on the Fourth of July
Tells of a Strike Against the VA
Over Hospital Care for the Disabled
See Also Deception
A Marjorie Trumaine Mystery
Larry D. Sweazy
(Seventh Street Books)
Some Oddballs Living in the Wilds of
North Dakota Beset by a Mad Killer
At the Ends of the Earth[G]
A History of the Polar Regions
Kieran Mulvaney
(Island/Shearwater)
Things You Possibly Don't Want to Know
About the Top and Bottom of the Earth
Haiku[G]
R. H. Blyth
(Heian International)
A Terrific Overview of Japan's National Poetry
With Copious (and Great) Samples
Sacred Pain[G]
Hurting the Body for
The Sake of the Soul
Ariel Glucklich
(Oxford)
The Tried-and-True Techniques of Those Who
Torture the Rest of Us in the Name of the Divine
Enemy Agents
In My Kitchen
Dr. Phage
[Article]
The Ability of So-Called Passive Objects to
Take Over (and Ruin) Our Everyday Life
Cold Water in Warm Springs
L. W. Milam
[Article]
Revealing the Take-Over of
One Great Rehabilitation Center by Those
Who Do Not Wish It (or Us) Well
My Friend Emma[G]
C. A. Amantea
[Article]
A Paean to "The Mother Teresa of Oaxaca"
The Year They Tried
To BlockThe Deputy
Warren Hinckle
[Article]
One of the Great Essays of
The Late Rabble-Rouser Writer
The Sunne Rising
John Donne
[Poem]
One of the Great Metaphysical Poems
From the Seventeenth Century
Cambridge Ladies
E. E. Cummings
[Poem]
A Tribute to Those Who Live in Furnished Souls
Are Unbeautiful and Have Comfortable Minds
After the Persian
Louise Bogan
[Poem]
Yes, Love - - - But I Do Not Wish to Know
The Depths of Your Terrible Jungle
Marriage
Chris Rock
[Paradox-of-the-Month]
Nelson Mandela Before (and After)
Issue #279
www.ralphmag.org/JA/indexJA.html
Mid-Fall 2016
Infantilizing the Geezers
Cradles
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
The October Surprise
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Ancient Review, Articles and Readings from RALPH
Brought back to life by new readers of the magazine
Rats:[G]
Observations on the History and Habitat
Of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
Robert Sullivan
(Bloomsbury)
An extended exegesis on those seedy little suckers
who hide in the lower reaches and waste our precious resources
(and who didn't come from Norway)
The Ascent of Money[G]
A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson
(Penguin)
The wonderful thinking of one of our most provocative economists
on the origins of capital and assets
Courthouses of Minnesota[G]
Mary Logue
Doug Ohman, Photographer
(Minnesota Historical Society)
100 or so great old buildings dedicated
to bureaucracy and guilt (and greed)
Pepys' Diary[G]
Samuel Pepys
Kenneth Branagh, Reader
(HighBridge Classics)
Memoirs of the lusty man of the Admiralty of 18th Century England
Vogue Women
Georgina Howell
(Thunder's Mouth Press)
100 photographs drawn from the magazine
from the last fifty years
Spanish Places[G]
B. E. Marsh
(Syren)
Memories of an American on
the Iberian peninsula fifty years ago
All the Fishes
Come Home to Roost[G]
An American Misfit in India
Rachael Manija Brown
(Rodale)
Unsettling memoirs of one who grew up with
a hippy mother and father in India many years ago
What I Think I Did[G]
A Season of Survival In Two Acts
Larry Woiwode
(Basic Books)
An ego-filled reminiscence of
a lifetime of writing and hero-worshipping
The Blast[G]
Alexander Berkman
(AK Press)
A history of the radical anarchist monthly
Terrors of the Table[G]
The Curious History
of Nutrition
Walter Gratzer
(Oxford)
Things you don't want to know
about the food you put in your mouth
Lindbergh[G]
Triumph and Tragedy
Richard Bak
(Taylor)
Things you don't want to know
about America's great hero
Peoples of the Plateau[G][B]
The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898 - 1915
Steven L. Grafe
(University of Oklahoma Press)
Great shots from southern Plateau Indians
of the Columbia Basin and
the Umatilla Indian Reservation
The Little Black Book Of Grisélidis Réal[G][B]
Days and Nights of An Anarchist Whore
Jean-Luc Hennig
(Semiotext(e)/MIT)
Just like it says: the rules and
strictures of an anarchist whore
Radio in the Dark Ages

L.W. Milam
[Article]
Memories of the days when
American radio was diverse (and diverting)
Apollo:[G][B]
Through the Eyes Of the Astronauts
Robert Jacobs, et al, Editors
(Abrams)
Gorgeous photos of the various missions
Speech Before the Last Graduating Class
of L'École du Néant
C. A. Amantea
Article
Life Science in 25 easy steps - - -
with recipes for great eatings
Man's Search For Meaning
Viktore E. Frankl
[Reading]
The secret of success - - -
don't aim for success
Belief
Douglas Cruickshank
[Reading]
A surprising cure for a fatal illness
Did I Know You Back Then?
Fade to Black
Colleen J. McElroy
[Poems]
Memories of life
in St. Louis and at Antioch
Cuando era tigre
Lisa Rappoport y Sasha Ryerson
[Poem]
Growing up as a tiger
Issue #280
www.ralphmag.org/JB/indexJB.html
Late Fall 2016
Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky
&
The Least Tern
Learning to See
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Great Disability Literature
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Thirty-three writers on the fate of all mankind
with reviews of their several titles
Jack London
The Paths Men Take Photographs, Journals and Reportages
David Sapienza, Editor
(Contrasto)
A selection from some of the thousands of photographs
that London took - - - along with a brief biography
Sightings of the Sacred
Cattle in Uganda, Madagascar and India
Daniel Naudé
(Prestel)
Photographs of the Zebu cattle of Madagascar and the Ankole of Uganda - - -
with some thoughts on their spiritualism
The Huntress
The Adventures, Escapades, and
Triumphs of Alicia Patterson
Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen
(Pantheon)
The life adventures of the one of the first aviatrixes In America
founder of the highly successful Newsday of Long Island
Blood Memory*
Colleen J. McElroy
(University of Pittsburgh Press)
Over fifty poems of growing up Black in St. Louis
Fire and Blood:*
The European Civil War, 1914 - 1945
Enzo Traverso
(Penguin/Verso)
A theory that the bloodshed in Europe
should be seen in terms of a civil - - -
e.g., familial conflict
The Whole Earth Field Guide
Caroline Maniaque-Benton
Meredith Gaglio, Editors
(MIT Press)
A contemporary recasting of the famous catalogue
from forty-five years ago
War and Turpentine*
Stefan Hertmans
(Pantheon)
A superb study of Hertmans' grandfather who
lived through the idyls of the Edwardian period and
the ghoulish trench warfare of WWI
Enlightening the World[G]
The Creation of the Statue of Liberty
Yasmin Sabina Khan
(Cornell University Press)
The story of the why and how of the American landmark
The Exploding Whale
Bernd Heinrich
[Reading]
How to deal with the new dead whale on your favorite beach
Belinda's World Tour
Franz Kafka
[Reading]
Postcards from an imaginary world trip that Kafka
sent to a favorite young girl
Becoming Amerikanskiy
Gary Shteyngart
[Reading]
A Russian family's life-changing trip to Florida
Monstrosities{G]
Bodies and British Romanticism
Paul Youngquist
(Minnesota)
Tales from days "when it was OK
to gawk at strange-looking people"
Body, Remember[G]
Kenny Fries
(Wisconsin)
Memories of growing up disabled
You Can't Be Too Careful
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Warnings to those who want to continue to use old,
outdated programs on old outdated comupters
Still Quiet on the Belgian Front
Stefan Hertmans
[Reading]
The exact (and doleful) experience of trench warfare from WWI
With Albert Schweitzer
(And Adlai Stevenson)
h In Darkest Africa
Alica & Michael Arlen
[Reading]
What it must have been like - - -
perhaps disconcerting at best - - -
to visit the good doctor's hospital in Africa
Blue Exits
Aaron Smith
[Poetry]
Poetry about contemplated suicides
Issue #281
www.ralphmag.org/JC/indexJC.html
Early Winter 2016
Mae Sarton
Jack London
A Letter from Timothy Geithner
The Foresaken
The Moscow Trials
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
The Why of Whys
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Myriad of Puzzling Paradoxes to
Puncture Your Paradigms
Surviving the Gulag*
A German Woman's Memoir
Ilse Johansen
(University of Alberta Press)
Ilse Survived Four Years in a Variety of
Gulags in Russia During and After WWII
Dog Years*
Stories
Melissa Yancy
(University of Pittsburgh)
Nine Sterling Short Stories - - -
Mostly about the Ill and the Dying
The History and Uncertain
Future of Handwriting
Anne Trubek
(Bloomsbury)
Stories about the Growth and Change of Penmanship
Over the Last Four Thousand Years
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere
John Gregory Brown
(Leo Boudreaux/Little Brown)
A Laconic Ex-High School Teacher
Survives Katrina (By Leaving Before It Hits)
White Trash
John King
(PM Press)
The Nurse of Nurses Meets
Her (and Our) Opposite
Sleeping on Jupiter
A Novel
Anuradha Roy
(Graywolf)
A Visit to the Indian Temples by
Five of the Most Laconic Characters in
Modern Literature
Snowball in a Blizzard
A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine
Steven Hatch, M. D.
(Basic Books)
A Mildly Interest Accounting of What to Believe
And What to Disbelieve in Contemporary Medicine
But What If We're Wrong?*
Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Chuck Klosterman
(Blue Rider Press)
Dozens of Counterintuitive Ideas about
Where We Think We're Going
And Where We Think
We Are and Have Been
In the American Grain[G]
William Carlos Williams
(New Directions)
Several Dozen Essays About America
From One of Our Best Poets
Primeval and Other Times[G]
Olga Tokarczuk
(Twisted Spoon)
The Much Overrun Polish Town
(With Magic and Spirits)
O Bitter, Bitter Gall
L. W. Milam
[Article]
A First-Hand Recounting of the Internal
Adventures of Belly and Bladder (Gall)
The Octomom vs. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Ben Eastham
[Reading]
How the Octomom Was Bested
By the Mortgage Breakdown of 2009
The Face Transplant Man
Melissa Yancy
[Reading]
A Tale of Those Who Are
Willing to Replace Your Face
In the Time of The Lime Trees
Olga Tokarzuk
[Reading]
A Winsome Story out of
Primeval and Other Times
Without Vodka
Adventures in Wartime Russia
Aleksander Topolski
(Steerforth)
Life and Hunger in the Gulag
When Tony Hoagland Says
My Maternal Instincts
Are Impressive
Jenny Browne
[Poem]
I don't know what he means.
Some people will eat anything.
Regret
(Poem on the Death of Elvis the Cat)
Jon Loomis
[Poem]
sprayer, shredder of chairs, backhanded gift
from a breakup - - - your ex moved in with her girlfriend,
no pets allowed.
Issue #282
www.ralphmag.org/JD/indexJD.html
Mid-Winter 2016 - 2017
Mae Sarton
Jack London
A Letter from Timothy Geithner
The Foresaken
The Moscow Trials
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
The Why of Whys
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Myriad of Puzzling Paradoxes to
Puncture Your Paradigms
Surviving the Gulag*
A German Woman's Memoir
Ilse Johansen
(University of Alberta Press)
Ilse Survived Four Years in a Variety of
Gulags in Russia During and After WWII
Dog Years*
Stories
Melissa Yancy
(University of Pittsburgh)
Nine Sterling Short Stories - - -
Mostly about the Ill and the Dying
The History and Uncertain
Future of Handwriting
Anne Trubek
(Bloomsbury)
Stories about the Growth and Change of Penmanship
Over the Last Four Thousand Years
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere
John Gregory Brown
(Leo Boudreaux/Little Brown)
A Laconic Ex-High School Teacher
Survives Katrina (By Leaving Before It Hits)
White Trash
John King
(PM Press)
The Nurse of Nurses Meets
Her (and Our) Opposite
Sleeping on Jupiter A Novel
Anuradha Roy
(Graywolf)
A Visit to the Indian Temples by
Five of the Most Laconic Characters in
Modern Literature
Snowball in a Blizzard
A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine
Steven Hatch, M. D.
(Basic Books)
A Mildly Interest Accounting of What to Believe
And What to Disbelieve in Contemporary Medicine
But What If We're Wrong?*
Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Chuck Klosterman
(Blue Rider Press)
Dozens of Counterintuitive Ideas about
Where We Think We're Going
And Where We Think
We Are and Have Been
In the American Grain[G]
William Carlos Williams
(New Directions)
Several Dozen Essays About America
From One of Our Best Poets
Primeval and Other Times[G]
Olga Tokarczuk
(Twisted Spoon)
The Much Overrun Polish Town
(With Magic and Spirits)
O Bitter, Bitter Gall
L. W. Milam
[Article]
A First-Hand Recounting of the Internal
Adventures of Belly and Bladder (Gall)
The Octomom vs. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Ben Eastham
[Reading]
How the Octomom Was Bested
By the Mortgage Breakdown of 2009
The Face Transplant Man
Melissa Yancy
[Reading]
A Tale of Those Who Are
Willing to Replace Your Face
In the Time of The Lime Trees
Olga Tokarzuk
[Reading]
A Winsome Story out of
Primeval and Other Times
Without Vodka
Adventures in Wartime Russia
Aleksander Topolski
(Steerforth)
Life and Hunger in the Gulag
When Tony Hoagland Says
My Maternal Instincts
Are Impressive
Jenny Browne
[Poem]
I don't know what he means.
Some people will eat anything.
Regret
(Poem on the Death of Elvis the Cat)
Jon Loomis
[Poem]
sprayer, shredder of chairs, backhanded gift
from a breakup - - - your ex moved in with her girlfriend,
no pets allowed.
Issue #283
www.ralphmag.org/JE/indexJE.html
Late Winter 2016 - 2017
The Holiday Spirit
Ants (or Scorpions) in the Pants
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Fifteen Suicides
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
Readings and Reviews (and Poems) from
Past Issues on a Vexing Subject
America Chartres
Buffalo's Waterfront Grain Elevators
Bruce Jackson
(Excelsior Editions/ State University of New York Press)
A Look at an Unusual Found Art Construct
The Abandoned Grain Elevators in Buffalo
The Wetback*
And Other Stories
Ron Arias
(Arte Publico)
Fourteen Stories from a New
Magical Realism School
The Golden Age
A Novel
Joan London
(Europa Editions)
A Hospital Romance between
Bookish Frank and Ethereal Elsa
Falling into the Mob*
Steve Zousmer
(Permanent Press)
He Drifts into the Mob by the Back Door
And Becomes the Klutziest Mafioso of Them All
Accidence Will Happen
A Recovering Pedant's Guide
To English Language and Style
Oliver Kamm
(Pegasus)
An Odd Appeal for Us to Honor the Language of
The Streets and Ignore the Pedants
Dance of the Jakaranda*
Peter Kimani
(Akashic Books)
On Building Kenya's "Lunatic Express"
And the Echoes from Sixty Years On
Sixty
A Diary of My Sixty-First Year
Ian Brown
(The Experiment)
A Despairing Document of Our Sixth Decade
The Drowned Detective*
A Novel
Neil Jordan
(Bloomsbury)
An Off the Wall Detective Story of
Mitteleuropa - - - Filled with Mystics, Failing
Marriages, and Improbable Reincarnations
Bugs, Bites, and Bowels[G]
Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth
(Cadogan Guides)
What You Should Fear on Your
Next Visit to Foreign Lands, and
What You Should Ignore
Paris Review Interviews[G]
Introduction by Philip Gourevitch
(Picador)
Fourteen Authors Quizzed - - -
Proving that Those Who Write
Should Mostly Do Only That
Old School[G]
Tobias Wolff
(Knopf)
A Heap of East Coast Prep School Stuff
With Wonderful Takes on Ayn Rand and Robert Frost
Homeless in Academe
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Moving from the Ivory Tower Directly to the
Homeless Tents in the University Parking Lot
The End of Democracy
D. Runciman
[Article]
The Hidden Destructive Violence in America:
Young Blacks in Jail, Older Whites in
Alcohol and Drug-Related Suicide
So You Want to Be a Mobster
A Primer
Steve Zousmer
[Reading]
A Innocent Corporate Schill Is Asked
To Lead a New York Mafioso Gang
On Finding a Lion in Your Bedroom
Lt. Colonel J. H. Patterson, D.S.O.
[Reading]
Owners of the "Lunatic Express" Find
The Lions Are Eating Up All the Prophets
A Guide for Spiritual Tourists
Hannah Faith Notess
[Poem]
It told us whether to cover our heads,
where to remove our sandals.
It told us not to wear shorts if male
and if female to be careful.
Sonnet for My Backyard Crickets
Two Weeks Gone
Jacqueline Osherow
[Poem]
Well, crickets, you're gone again
and again I haven't gotten around
to thanking you properly - - - a habit of mine.
The same thing happened with my ex-husband,
though, at least, in his case, I tried.
Issue #284
www.ralphmag.org/JF/indexJF.html
Early Spring 2017
Ron Arias
Palenque and "Toxicos"
The Strange Death of Thomas Merton
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
15 Knee-Slappers
The Editors of RALPH
[List]
A Dozen or So of the Funniest Books
from the Early Days of RALPH
Sober Stick Figure
A Memoir
Amber Tozer
(Running Press)
A Full-Time Alcoholic Tells of Her Blackouts, Drunken
Lay-Overs, and the Impossibility of
Stopping with the First Bottle
Tales from Nowhere
Unexpected Stories from Unexpected Places
Don George, Editor
(Lonely Planet)
Thirty or so Horror Tales from Being on the Road
Presented Here as If the Book Were Brand New.
It Ain't - - - Having Been Published Ten Years Ago
Joyce Brothers
The Founding Mother of Television Psychology
Kathleen Collins
(Rowman & Littlefield)
Dr. Brothers Was a Bona Fide Psychology - - -
But She Broke into Television by Pretending to Be
A Master on the Exotica of Boxing
Where I Can See You
Larry Sweazy
(Seventh Street)
Detective Hud Mathews Goes Back to Lake Demmie
Where the Bodies Start Dropping Like Flies
The Tortoise of History
Poems
Anselm Hollo
(Coffee Hoouse)
Exotic Beatnik Poetry by One Who Grew Up in Finland
The Colour of Shadows
Images of Caribbean Slavery
Judy Raymond
(Caribbean Studies Press)
A Few, Very Few, Pictures by Richard Bridgens
With Endless Text on Slavery Horrors in Trinidad
New World Dharma
Interviews and Encounters with
Buddhist Teachers, Writers, and Leaders
Trevor Carolan
(State University of New York)
More than Thirty American Masters of Buddhism
on the Coming of that Discipline to these Shores
One String Guitar
A Novel
Mona de Vestel
(Harvard Square Editions)
A Catalogue of Horrors of
[1] The Rwandan genocide
Followed by a Catalogue of Horrors of
[2] 19th Century American Indians
Missing Believed Killed[G]
The Remarkable Story of
A Japanese POW Camp Survivor
John Baxter
(Arum Books)
Three Years During WWII as a Japanese Prisoner
Nights in the Pink Motel[G]
An American Strategist's Pursuit of Peace in Iraq
Robert Earle
(Naval Institute Press)
A Sterling Account of John Negroponte's "Thinker" - - -
Trying to Come Up with an "Exit Strategy" from Iraq
Reviews of Two New Hollywood Epics
"Monster Trucks" and "Great Wall"
Dr. Phage
[Article]
Two Recent Films Dissected with Aplomb
A Brief, Subjective, Personal, Biased, Irregular Survey of
Arts and Literary Sites on the Web
Douglas Cruickshank
[Article]
Ten Great Literary/Arts Links to Be Found Online
The Municipal Jail in Mérida
Charles Portis
[Reading]
A Jail That Doesn't Care If You Go Hang
Thomas Merton's Death
Interview with John Russell
[Reading]
Some Thoughts on the Controversial
Death of the Famed Religious Figure
Hunchback Mountain
100-Year-Old Poet
Anselm Hollo
[Poetry]
Modigliani
first name Amedeo
didn't live long enough
to paint you
this morning
(or one of many mornings)
stretched out
beside me
Letter from Breslau Prison
Rosa Luxemburg
[Reading]
Letter to Sophie Liebnecht on
Solitary Christmas in Prison
Issue #285
www.ralphmag.org/JG/indexJG.html
Mid-Spring 2017
RALPH's Stodgy Humor
Drugs and The Winter War
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Looking for Betty MacDonald
The Egg, the Plague,
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I
Paula Becker
(University of Washington Press)
An Exhaustive Examination of
the Life and Works of the Elegant
Comic Pacific Northwest Writer
The Boat Rocker
Ha Jin
(Pantheon)
An Odd Book Telling of
A Man Obsessed by the Writings
of his Ex-Wife
The Enigma of Iris Murphy**
Stories Maureen Millea Smith
(Livingston Press)
The Moving Tale of a Public Defender Who
Is Suddenly Defending Herself against Death
And the Monkey Learned Nothing*
Dispatches from a Life in Transit
Tom Lutz
(Sightline/University of Iowa)
Sixty Eight Dispatches from All Over the World
In Comic, Detailed Form
The Hemingway Thief
Shaun Harris
(Seventh Street Books)
A Lost Manuscript of Hemingway Found in
Seedy Ensendada Baja
Get Well Soon
History's Worst Plagues and
The Heroes Who Fought Them
Jennifer Wright
(Henry Holt)
A Semi-Comic Approach to the Most Devastating
Diseases that Have Plagued Humanity
Polio Boulevard**
A Memoir
Karen Chase
(Excelsior/State University of
New York Albany)
A Gentle Story of the Author's Time in Hospital
with the Now Conquered Disease
Human Heart, Cosmic Heart
A Doctor's Quest to Understand, Treat,
And Prevent Cardiovascular Disease
Thomas Cowan, M. D.
(Chelsea Green)
An Off-the-Wall Disquisition on Heart Disease - - -
And Some of Its More Obscure Cures
Heavy Metal
A Novel
Andrew Bourelle
(Autumn House)
A Surprisingly Vivid Story of Two Brothers and
Gang Warfare through the Haze of Heavy Metal
A Frozen Hell[G]
The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939 - 40
William R. Trotter
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
How the Russians Were Stymied for
The Better Part of a Year in Beating
The Finns in 1940 -1941
Abbott Awaits[G]**
A Novel
Chris Bachelder
(Louisiana State University Press)
A Classic Child Raises the Father from
An Unknown (and Superb) Author
As Long as I'm
Still Entertainable
Mike Ervin
[Article]
One of the Best Disabled Writers on
What Happens When They Take Away Everything
Cameron Kills Pretty Enemy LLP
Maureen Millea Smith
[Reading]
A Lawyer from the Rez - - -Learning How
To Live with His Interns
Life on a Chicken Ranch
Daily Tasks on the Chicken Ranch
Betty MacDonald
[Readings]
Making the Best of Life on
The Wilds of Washington State
A Kennedy in Each of Us
Gary Margolis
[Poem]
The senator's son wasn't supposed to tell
anyone his mother and father were drunks
he loved. Like you and me, he was the secret
they counted on, to hold things in.
Recuerdo
Edna St. Vincent Millay
[Poem]
We were very tired, we were very merry - - -
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable - - -
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon . . .
The Bestiary[S]
Or, Procession of Orpheus
Guillaume Apollinaire
X. J. Kennedy, Translator
(Johns Hopkins University Press)
The Twenty-Six Aanimals in The Bestiary
In Woodcuts by Raoul Dufy.
Issue #286
www.ralphmag.org/JH/indexJH.html
Late Spring 2017
Al Capone's Beer Wars
The Founders of RALPH
This Life by Karel Schoeman
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
15 Wriggly Animals
The Editors
[List]
Earlier reviews about those creatures who love to love you
(or even want to love you to death)
WPA Buildings*
Architecture and Art of the New Deal
Joseph Maresca
(Schiffer)

A Run-Down of The Great Depression Experiment with
Grand, Restrained, Gently Elegant Public Buildings
A Guided Tour of Hell
A Graphic Memoir
Samuel Bercholz
(Shambhala)
One man's guided visit to the Buddha hell to get cooked
- - - alternating with frozen blisters and chilblains
Isabella of Castile
Europe's First Great Queen
Giles Tremlett
(Bloomsbury)
One of the first Iron Iron ladies
Elephants in My Back Yard*
A Memoir
Rajiv Surendra
(Regan Arts)
All he wanted to do was to land the starring
role in The Life of Pi - - - but failing that,
he charms to reader beyond all good reason
A Thin Bright Line*
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
(University of Wisconsin)
The scary gay lives of American women of the 1950s
At the Edge of the Orchard
Tracy Chevalier
(Penquin)
The ordinary day-to-day horrors of staking out
land in mid-nineteenth century America - - - and yet
ending up as expert on native trees.
The Selected Letters of John Cage*
Laura Kuhn
(Wesleyan University Press)
An engrossing collection - - - the best
of the atonal black-arts magician
This Life[G]*
Karel Schoeman
(Archipelago)
A transfixing novel on survival of
the Africaans in South Africa 150 years ago
Arrogance[G]*
Joanna Scott
(Picador)
The mad momentous artist Egon Schiele
revealed in all his bawdy splendor
The Richard A. C. Greene Campaign for
Washington State Land Commissioner
L. W. Milam
[Article]
One of the most ferociously bizarre
political campaigns of the last fifty years
Cancer in Midlife
Maureen Millea Smith
[Reading]
Mid-life woe from The Enigma of Iris Murphy
The Exploding Whale
Bernd Heinrich
[Reading]
The Do's and Don't's of caring for a
whale body washed up on your beach
Heart Test with An Echo Chamber
Margaret Atwood
[Poem]
Wired up at the ankles and one wrist,
a wet probe rolling over my skin,
I see my heart on a screen
like a rubber bulb or a soft fig, but larger,
enclosing a tentative double flutter,
the rhythm of someone out of breath
but trying to speak anyway; two valves opening
and shutting like damp wings
unfurling from a gray pupa.

Seven Poems from the Writers of RALPH
Tootie-Fruit ME & Ass-Grasp LA
C. A. Amantea
[Poems]
In conclusion, I should like to report that our brains
Are now pickled & dried with love, & are thus weighted
In units of filial darkness. Our watches separate time
From space (in planetary feet) & thus put us on the
Very last train to Bugger Bean OH or Assgrasp LA,
All singing Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani.

Issue #287
www.ralphmag.org/JI/indexJI.html
Early Summer 2017

To Say It Unbridled
Scabies, Baby
The Readers of RALPH
[Letters]
Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH

The Weirdest Books
The Editors
[List]
Some of the Oddest Books that have
Come into the Magazine for Review

Such a Waste of Stars*
Poems
Tom Crawford
(The Search)
One of the Best of the New Poets - - -
with a Typically Dry & Buddha Wit of It All

Vintage Trailer Voyeur
A Peek Inside the
Unique Trailer Culture
Victoria Ocken
(Schiffer)
Those Lovely Floating Land Launches - - -
Here Renewed with Care

Mrs. Caliban**
Rachel Ingalls
(New Directions)
A Reissue of the Great Novel from Thirty Years Ago
- - - Complete with a Jolly (and Steamy)
Green Lover (and His Sedate Love)

What She Ate:
Six Remarkable Women and
The Food that Tells Their Story
Laura Shapiro
(Viking)
Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Gurley Brown,
Dorothy Wordsworth and Eva Braun - - - and the Food They Did
(And More Often Didn't) Eat

Olio*
Tyehimba Jess
(Wave Books)
Being Black in a Slave World - - - and the
Tools used to Get Out from Under

Unforbidden Pleasures**
Adam Phillips
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A Terrific Study of the Contradictory Forces
That Made Us (and Oedipus, & Adam & Eve) Tick

Finks
How the CIA Tricked The World's Best Writers
Joel Whitney
(OR Books)
Our Best (and Most Wily) Literature Types
Lulled into Thinking They Were Being Free (While
Marching to The Beat of a Different Drummer)

A People's History of Poverty in America[G]
Stephan Pimpare
(The New Press)
How to Control the Poor with Monies
(That Keep Them on the Straight, the Narrow
and the Locked Up)

Skin Deep[G]
Tattoos, the Disappearing West, Very Bad
Men, and My Deep Love for them All
Karol Griffin
(Harcourt)
A Terrific Autobiography about How to
Decorate Tough Guys with Needle and Ink

The Ultimate Retirement
L. W. Milam
[Article]
The Final Laying Out of Our Final Days

Refusing an Honorary Degree
The Proper Diet, and
Telling the President of TWA Airlines
About the Best
Flight Food

John Cage
[Readings]
It Wasn't All About Time (4:33)
In the Master's World

Slavery and the Welfare State
Stephen Pimpare
[Reading]
Public Relief, Indentured Servitude and Slavery

Redwing, The Pie Is Now
Tom Crawford
[Poetry]
"It's silly to talk to the peach tree
about future pies, that's why
we have portfolio managers
for those who want to get ahead,
which can be hell on a good night's sleep."

Three More Poems
Survival
The Forge
Bad Day at the Beauty Salon
Lynne Knight, George Bilgere, Maggie Estep
[Poetry]
I sat inside like a portrait, pretending to be a portrait
when he came by, holding my breath, eyes staring straight
beyond him. Your mother's disappeared again,
he'd call to my daughter, who'd come near, feign
a search for me. Some people need to escape,
she'd say, and wave her hand, and turn away.

Lusitania[S]
An Epic Tragedy
Diana Preston
(Walker)
The Moment-by-Moment of the Great Disaster
(That Changed the Course, for Worse)
of the U.S. - - - 1917

[G] = Great Reviews, Readings, or Poems of the Past
[O] = Books from Past Years Reviewed
[B] = Brief Reviews
*A Book that the Editors Believe Merits Your Attention

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