NEW TITLES
Owls
"'The bottom
of an owl's nest
makes a nice home,'
says Ms. Berger, although
we believe the word 'nice'
should be considered relative.
'It's a messy mulch
of its own feces,
coughed up owl pellets, and
the remains of prey
such as mice and beetles.'"

Moscow Stories
"One must,
he suggests,
be extremely polite but
at the same time
be an enormous bother,
showing up every morning
early enough to
meet the relevant official
as he entered the building,
soaking up the time of
all the personnel
in the office while never
giving genuine grounds
for irritation."

DNA
"DNA is a whitish,
thread-like material,
which can be scooped up and
wound around a glass rod ---
a common, if rather nerdy,
source of entertainment for
undergraduate genetics students
in their laboratory classes."

My Chaos Theory
"In these stories,
the author is pushing
the limits of masochism,
and in the process,
doing violence
to his subjects,
and, as well,
the reader."

Time at War
"He doesn't hide,
nor does he burnish,
his problem with stuttering,
his homosexual affairs,
his terror at being
in the middle of the firing line."

Great Reviews of the Past
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
"The author
is not shy about
going on extended meditations
on such enjambments as ghosts,
horses in the city of Madrid,
the roots of certain Anglo-Saxon words
(in reference to different men
having congress with the same woman),
hotels and restaurants in London,
sleep and dreams,
the role of change in our lives,
and, most of all,
death."

BRIEF REVIEWS
Penetrating Wisdom
Dancing Under the Red Star
Hebrew Illuminations

LETTERS
Dorothy Parker
Typos in RALPH
Instruction Manual for
Receiving God

MORE LETTERS
Maori Hongi
Angry Letters to RALPH

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
The Road to Real Estate Wealth
Of the King Who Had Even

ARTICLES
Great Articles of the Past
Michael Ingall
"An 'unsolicited manuscript'
sounds as appetizing as
an 'unwashed leper,' or
an 'uncircumcised heathen.'
Still, I enclose one copy of same
(the manuscript, not the leper),
in the hope that you will
find it of enough interest
to publish."

Billy Wong
"He was a gentle man.
Everyone loved and accepted him.
His family took him home for dinner
at Christmas every year,
but otherwise they
left him to us."

READINGS
Ten-Year-Old in Hernia Operation
"In that moment of terror
when they lowered
the ether mask
over his face
as though to smother him,
he could have sworn
that the surgeon,
whoever he was, had whispered,
'Now I'm going to
turn you into a girl.'"

Falling in Love with Rosemary
"I went out to
where my car was parked
and I gave her the keys.
I lay down in the road
where she could run over me.
She said she did not
know how to drive."

POETRY
Public Transportation
"the century streaming
high over the dammed-up      highways the dark and
sparkling Potomac     while over us planes rose and
somewhere beyond their glow so did the brightening stars"

Outside Las Vegas
"I'd walk out on myself if I could.
I love the distant glow in the nighttime desert sky
like a worn yellow spot in the dark
everything might still slip through."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

A PITHY SAMPLE
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"

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