Rob Vollmar is WLT’s book review and online editor. He is currently researching sustainability in the industrial food system while pursuing a master’s degree in integrated studies at the University of Oklahoma.
John ZerzanWhen We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics
Feral House, 2021
This collection of essays by John Zerzan takes stock of the dizzying arra...
THE LATEST BOOK by environmental writer Richard Heinberg finds him working with familiar material but with a new and insightful twist. In Power (New Society, 2021), Heinberg...
Background image: typescript of “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims,” by B. C Franklin / Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from...
Photo by Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr
The Gospel According to H. L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020) is an audacious book that foregrounds translation as a means of critiquing our understa...
NICK KARY’S MATERIAL(Chelsea Green, 2020) uses the narrative tools of the psychogeographer to map the flows from human needs to the natural environment as resources...
Paolo Cognetti
The Wild Boy
Trans. Erica Segre & Simon Carnell
Washington Square Press / Atria
FEELING A BIT overburdened by the demands of civilized life but la...
Photo: Bruce Hedge
David Holmgren is an environmental designer, writer, and co-creator of the permaculture concept, which uses systems theory to create by design the resiliency found in na...
Hummingbirds Between the Pages
Chris Arthur
Ohio State University Press (2018)
Chris Arthur’s most recent collection of essays, Hummingbirds Between the Pages, makes a compelling argument on...
Photo: Claire Huteau (2017)
Meïkhâneh
La Silencieuse
Buda Music
La Silencieuse is the second album by Meïkhâneh, a musically expansive trio from Rennes, France, that brin...
Photo: Andrew Cagle
Hello Psychaleppo
Toyour
Hello Psychaleppo’s third release, Toyour, draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, some musical, some literary, and all celeb...
Thomas Hardy’s home, Max Gate, sits at the east end of Dorchester. Photo: Michael Day
There are few British authors for whom place played a more important role in their work than Thomas Hardy. By all...
Mathias Énard’s Compass (New Directions, 2017) is not only a love letter to the field of orientalism but, more broadly, to the power of the written word itself, especially in translation. I...
With a wealth of fiction, nonfiction, and verse stacking up in his office, Book Review Editor Rob Vollmar has narrowed his reading ambitions for the summer down to these three worthy titles....
Rahim AlHaj
Letters from Iraq: Oud and String Quintet
Smithsonian Folkways
Iraqi-born composer Rahim AlHaj’s latest album, Letters from Iraq, is his most ambitious to date. AlHaj...
OY
Space Diaspora
Crammed Discs
This issue’s special section on climate dystopias set me wondering what kind of responses to an uncertain future dwell in the world music community. One...
Google Deep Dream illustration by David Futrelle.
Due to space constraints, the following excerpts from our Alan Moore interview in the January issue had to be cut. That interv...
In addition to his better-known work as a writer of comics and novels, Alan Moore has built a considerable body of spoken-word albums, most created in conjunction with a collective known as Moon and S...
Alan Moore. Photo: Joe Brown
Alan Moore is the most celebrated comics writer living but doesn’t write comics anymore. For the past decade, he’s been working instead on his second novel, Jerusalem...
Beats Antique
Shadowbox
Antique
American composer Henry Cowell traveled to a variety of countries in the 1950s on behalf of the State Department, building bridges between cultures conside...
Guus Kuijer
The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis
Trans. Laura Watkinson
Seven Stories Press, 2016
The Bible has occupied a central position in Western culture sin...
Tajaliyatt
Afoforo Music Club
Tajaliyatt is the second album from the ambitious Achref Chargui Trio. Composed of the aforementioned Chargui, a Tunisian oud playe...
With a toddler to parent, WLT’s book review editor, Rob Vollmar, isn’t anticipating being able to go much of anywhere this summer, so he’s relying on his summer reads to take...
Ibrahim Maalouf
Kalthoum
Impulse!
“Umm Kalthoum is the quintessential Arab,” Uncle Jihad said. “She’s probably the one person whom all Arabs can agree to love . . .”—Rabih A...