Announcing The Improbable: Reviews by Booksellers for Booksellers

A new, monthly collection of little reviews from independent booksellers is up and running! For its first issue, The Improbable feasts on new books from Ed Sanders, Claudia Rankine, Ray Johnson, Susan Howe, Amarnath Ravva, and Dorothy Iannone, and the plan is to do five to seven reviews a month written by "booksellers from some of the most vibrant and lovingly curated bookstores in the U.S." "The reviews are short—they're intended as a thoughtful starting place, an instigation to pick the book up yourself and share it with others." Here's an excerpt from Green Apple Books' Anna Zalokostas, who reviewed Susan Howe's Spontaneous Particulars (New Directions 2014):

Of course this is a book that can be read, but more than anything, Spontaneous Particulars demands to be looked at—and touched. Manuscript fragments, discarded scraps of silk, a pricked pattern, a prescription pad: to run your hand or mind over the affinities and relations Howe stitches together is to understand the quite literal beauty of text that flirts with illegibility. The pleasures of the mind are as sensual as any, and the visual, tactile, and acoustic resonances are as dense with information as the words themselves.

While digital archives open up entire vistas of possibility, Howe’s concern here is with the physical, an encounter that can open up or disrupt time in a different way. “The secret of the poetic art lies in the keeping of time,” writes Howe, quoting Duncan. But isn’t this exactly what libraries gather and guard, what they proffer: time, and the pleasures of time outside an economy of use? As the physical space of our towns and cities is increasingly contested, the library remains a sanctuary, not just a geographical location, but a possible landscape, a place where “a thought may surprise itself at the instant of seeing.” Howe, quoting Williams: “There is a wind or ghost of a wind in all books echoing the life there.”

We heart this new space. And it's obviously thoughtful; their next issue will center on Moyra Davey, Caroline Bergvall, and more. The mission is to "care deeply about writers and artists who obey no boundaries, pay no fealty to trends and invite readers to see the world anew by reading word and image in provocative, unfamiliar ways."