EIGHTEEN HITS
Here are 18 titles
from the first half of 2008,
books that our editors
have found to be
the most meritorious,
those that received the
much-sought-after
***STAR***
in RALPH's
General Index

NEW TITLES
Of Kids & Parents
"Johan and Lazarus
who were born in London and
formed in such a way that
Johan was growing out
of the chest of his
normally developed brother,
so throughout their lives
they were looking at
each other's faces."

The Carver and the Artist
"It's so gorgeous
that you want to call up
Qantas and get over there ASAP
for a looksee but its
$4400 atop all the credit
you have loaded on your
Visa and you are already
being dinged 19.9%
so forget it."

The Soul Thief
"We know that
Shakespeare made up Hamlet
who may also have been Shakespeare,
or his son,
or the Earl of Rochester.
Jane Austen was
Emma, wasn't she?
Or at least she makes us wonder
if Emma could have
written a novel called
Jane Austen?"

One More Year
"In this moil of
transnational
miscommunication,
and outside of a
computer pot-pie,
all I got was a headache.
And a deep longing
never to go to Georgia;
at least, not
that Georgia.
Savannah, maybe.
Tbilisi, never."

Eat, Pray, Love
"After a split with
her husband under
ambiguous circumstances ---
he may have found out
the truth about her
sniveling ways ---
Liz decides to journey
to foreign lands to,
you guessed it, eat,
pray and love."

Talking out of School
"She wonders why
it doesn't work out.
Those of us who made
the same career mistake either
bailed out as soon as possible
or retreated into being
mumbling alcoholics who taught
as few classes as possible
and specialized in
the printing history of
Two Gentlemen of Verona. "

The Animal That Therefore I Am
"His primary question is
'What does your cat think
when you stand naked before it?'
You mean that's it?
Yes: Derrida's sense of shame
there buck-naked,
before Tabby's naked eyes."

Great Reviews of the Past
Long Way Back to the River Kwai
"When the Armistice was announced,
he and his fellow prisoners at Changi prison
did not even bother to go out of
the gates even though the guards had disappeared.
Those movies we see of the prisoners
jumping and shouting and laughing and crying
when victory comes are as false
as the fabled bridge over the river."

TEN INTERVIEWS
A reader wrote
to ask if we
had an interview online
with Francesca Hetfield.
Well, no, but it
set us to thinking
of other great interviews
we have published over
the past fourteen years.

LETTERS
DADA
Disability

MORE LETTERS
RALPH To Receive
$10,000,000
Everett Gee Jackson

EVEN MORE LETTERS
America's Child
Insensitive Reviewers

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Bare Hope Love

ARTICLES
Wordolatry
"While Leftist meetings in the West
were orgies of empty talk,
the Peoples' Democracies and
similar horrors were entire states,
with police powers,
dedicated to insuring that
all of life for everybody
became exactly like
those meetings."

Great Articles from the Past
Beautiful Summer in New Jersey
"Mary, a very
bad student in math,
climbed the stairs
every noon to study
with Mrs. Anderson
in the attic. And every day,
we heard the impact of
Mrs. Anderson's teaching,
the old, much-stained,
wooden paddle.
Ow, ow, ow,
Mary would cry,
resisting her math."

READINGS
Human Goulash
(Eating the Girl in the Wreck)
"So in the end
they got the meat out,
fried it in oil,
and then they gradually added
the rest of the marinade,
stewing it until they had a sort of ragout,
a sort of human goulash.
They put it on the table and sat down,
passed the plates out,
hesitating for a moment,
but apparently it gave off
a wonderful smell,
so they knocked back
one more shot
and ate it."

To Meet Your Son
(After Twenty Years)
"The blood froze
in my veins and
my heart started pumping
like it was trying to
jump out of my body because
the person I saw in front of me
was me twenty years ago,
a confused, essentially negative,
hypersensitive shit who
views the world as an
incomprehensible maze
of emotions."

POETRY
Tuareg
"I have decided to join the Tuareg.
I have send away for full details
and an application form, enclosing an s.a.e.
The things you're most attached to,
they're the ones you need the least,
as Bob Dylan says, or more or less."

Great Poems of the Past
litany
"Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant?
i will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and i will eat it and call
it a carolyn sandwich. then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayonnaise and
that is how you shall love me in my restaurant?..."

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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