By David Kolb (University of Georgia Press, 2008)

In this polemic, philosopher and place theorist David Kolb deploys unconventional thinking in the service of what turn out to be commonsense ideas. Kolb finds distinctions where others assume homogeneity; his baseline act of discernment is to recognize that suburbs are neither small villages nor large cities, and therefore should be approached as unique phenomena. Kolb rejects the many critics who, because they are looking through the lens of arcadia or the metropolis, find America’s sprawling zones devoid of intricacy—or, worse yet, “nonplaces” unworthy of consideration. Instead, he marshals many theoretical sources to argue that such places have inherent “complexity” worth amplifying. He employs this term in several ways: the structural, which largely encompasses the natural and man-made environments; the social, in which citizens negotiate with each other and the structural backdrop; and what might be called the technological-economic-political, that (mostly) invisible network of links that underpins connected life in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging these forces requires active engagement: “Places should be inhabited with more lived sense of their complex internal multiplicities and linkages, and with more self-consciousness of the multiple forces and pressures at work.” The book seems aimed primarily at the community of thinkers with whom Kolb engages, as well as architects and urban planners, and on occasion it is tough going, particularly in the first two chapters. But Kolb gains momentum as he begins a sustained analysis of themed places and suburban environments. This investigation draws in particular on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and extends to suburbs some of the claims made by Manuel Castells (for networked societies) and Henri Lefebvre (for cities). Discussing Disney parks, New Urbanist villages, and haphazardly planned suburbs as they currently exist, Kolb puts forth brief suggestions, from creating architectural follies in pocket parks to altering zoning and tax regulations, for “grasp[ing] creatively the possibilities offered by contemporary places, without undue nostalgia or elation.”

A hypertext available at Kolb’s website offers further considerations of the topic.

Brian Sholis, a writer based in Brooklyn, is editor of Artforum.com and coeditor of The Uncertain States of America Reader (Sternberg Press, 2006).

…and Donna Doherty specifically for the generous profile of our publication that appeared in today’s paper. The actual physical newspaper included this snazzy photo of editor Mark Oppenheimer, publisher Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Mark’s daughter Rebekah in dramatic lighting:

What the article says is all true too. So, Greater New Haveners: If you’re interested in submitting, we’re looking forward to hearing from you. If you’re interested in subscribing, we thank you in advance. And if you’re just here to read what we’ve published and posted so far, welcome. Take your time and have a look around. We hope you like what you see.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

By Philip Lutgendorf (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Primates are our animal cousins, but most of us know them only on a photo-album basis. In India, people and monkeys live cheek by jowl, and relations are strained. Monkeys are dirty, aggressive pests, pelting pedestrians with nuts and climbing into open windows to grab anything not nailed down. Yet one of the subcontinent’s most beloved divinities is the monkey-god Hanuman. The hero Rama’s sidekick in the national epic Ramayana, Hanuman is revered in his own right in temples and household shrines throughout India.

Philip Lutgendorf, professor of Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, has written a fascinating study of Hanuman. Unlike traditional scholars of Hinduism who focused on theological texts, Lutgendorf is interested in everyday religious experience, where so-called “minor gods” such as Hanuman often loom larger than major ones (such as Shiva and Vishnu). Lutgendorf pursues the monkey-god through religious practice but also films, television, comics, and the garish Technicolor prints that small businesses distribute as complimentary wall-calendars. (One of these adorns the book’s cover.) He also includes Hanuman’s biography from popular legend, analyzing the many variants of each episode. According to one version, when the infant Hanuman decides to swallow the sun, the earth is cast into darkness until he coughs it up. In another version, he swallows it and is destroyed, but the gods reassemble him from tiny pieces, and in a third he puts it in his mouth but spits it out because it tastes like meat and he is a vegetarian. (His powers extend to his monkey-mother, who destroys a mountain with a jet of breast-milk.) At times, Hanuman seems an Indian version of Godzilla, a fearsome, destructive, but lovable creature, blurring the boundary between animals, humans and gods. Hanuman’s Tale brings him in his many forms to a western audience.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.

By Junius Podrug (Forge, 2007)

Harold Robbins’ name is still selling books. Unfortunately, he died in 1997 and his name is all he has left to offer. With the blessing of the Robbins estate, the novelist’s friend Junius Podrug has now written four Robbins novels. On the shiny covers of these poor substitutes, Podrug’s name is dwarfed by Robbins’s. The idea of continuing a successful franchise isn’t deplorable (some of those Flowers in the Attic sequels are pretty good), but Podrug’s complete lack of understanding about what made Robbins’s novels great is a true literary crime.

In The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, or Memories of Another Day or The Raiders or any of a dozen other titles from what I consider his most fertile period — in the 1970s and 1980s, after he’d moved on from his derivative-of-John O’Hara melodramatic page-turners — Robbins created a new class of upper-class hero. His characters were conflicted and engaged in savage confrontations for their entire lives, however cushily they were raised. Their sex drives were as strong as their lusts for power and money. They were always on the verge of being blackmailed or unmasked for closeted sins that ranged from homosexuality to impotence to, in several different novels, closeted Jewish upbringings. (Robbins himself was the Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, though he disguised that heritage — he put out that he was a Jew who’d lost his parents and had been raised in a Catholic boy’s school. This and many other self-made myths were debunked by Andrew Wilson in his respectful, well-researched, and culturally contextualized biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, published last fall.)

Robbins was able to pin the needles on all possible megalomaniac meters and make his characters both shameful and pitiable: “Joni sucked on John’s penis and wept at the same time. ‘We’ll never — why couldn’t you have just gone to Harvard?’” (In that passage, from Tycoon, it’s worth noting that Joni and John are brother and sister.) Podrug, on the other hand, writes quaint adventure tales grounded in nothing approaching reality. The Looters involves a museum curator searching for the death mask of a legendary Babylonian queen. Worse, he jettisons Robbins’ essential omniscient-narrator style for a clunky first-person: “We finally reached the larger boat and I went aboard to meet the band of pirates, smugglers and thieves.”

There are many who wrongly considered Harold Robbins, despite his being one of the five biggest-selling novelists in history, to be the dregs of popular fiction. All those naysayers have to do to be proved outrageously wrong is to read his chosen successor.

Christopher Arnott is the managing editor of the New Haven Advocate.

By Lilli Carré (Top Shelf Productions, 2006)

Strictly speaking, Tales of Woodsman Pete is a comic, and it is funny and action-packed and presented in a series of frames. But it’s also touching and tragic, tender and wrenching—a stellar example of the sheer range of possibilities implicit in this surprisingly expansive medium.

Let there be no doubt: Lilli Carré is an artist. Her words are pure literature: intelligent, economical, unexpected. On the visual side, her line is confident yet simple, resembling a woodcut incision; her figures are unassuming, endearing, and utterly distinctive.

Our hero Pete is a thickly bearded hunter who lives alone in the woods surrounded by things that he has killed: his best friend Philippe (an inanimate bear rug), some mounted deer heads, and the specter of a wife slain accidentally (by buckshot or pollen, we never find out which). Pete monologues endlessly in search of conversation, ever nostalgic for missing companions but cheerfully unaware of his complicity in finding himself alone. When Pete’s house is crushed by a falling tree, the narrative frame shifts to examining the lives of the blue ox Babe and his pal Paul Bunyan (presumably the one who caused the tree to fall on Pete’s house), who is gloomy from reading Proust and depressed that, because of his bulk, it takes so many beers to get sufficiently drunk. We learn of Paul’s problems with women, not a few of whom he has “mistakenly crushed” in the act of attempting intimacy. Paul—like Pete—leaves a heavy footprint, invariably annihilating the things around him without agenda or animus. He just doesn’t fit in this world.

The narrative shuttles back and forth between Pete and Paul, two sides of a coin, united by their full beards, their utter sincerity, their love of skipping stones, and their dogged pursuit of something undefined. They are dreamers both, and both marooned in solitude. We are left wondering whether Pete is dreaming Paul or Paul is dreaming Pete. Ultimately, the pleasure lies in the question itself.

At twenty-four years of age, Carré has loudly crashed the indie comic world, and is particularly well known in her hometown of Chicago. She also makes short animated films, one of which has shown at Sundance. She’s a genius in the comics medium, but would likely be a genius in any medium. Her Pete is a worthy introduction for the curious—an incisive, delightful primer in what’s so exciting about comics these days.

Freelance writer Matthew Swanson makes books with his wife, illustrator Robbi Behr, in a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.