12 Hit Pix
Each month, our server tells us, we get between
175,000 and 225,000 visitors to this site.
We are told that not a few of these
come along for the pictures.
Here are twelve that get called up most often ---
along with the reviews or articles or poems
that accompany them.

NEW TITLES
Firefly
"You never wanted children, Mr. Coward?"
"Not for a second."
"You have loved a woman, Boss?"
he asks, with a roguish glint in his eye.
"Not once? Not ever?"
Noël laughs. "If you mean have I ever
had sex with a woman, the answer is no.
It would, I imagine, be like sleeping with a porpoise.
Have I ever loved a woman?
Perhaps."

Allegiance and Betrayal
"When Greg calls him 'Mr. Siems,'
he replies: 'Booger, please.
Everybody calls me Booger.'"

A Short Tale of Shame
"Maya is thinking about her ex-boyfriend,
the one who looked like a bear.
He would give her a friendly smile and
she was sure that his ursine river was
flowing a calmly and gently as ever
through thick Slavic forests filled with
wooly elms and raspberries twinkling
amid the greenery."

The Round House
"The Ojibwa belief is clearly stated:
when you kill an animal,
part of that animal will
migrate into your soul,
become part of your being,
your persona."

Snow Hunters
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Glorious Misadventures
"Our chronicler, who, we gather,
suffered through the whole thing
in the noble interest of history, writes,
The novel can only be described as fascinatingly bad."

The Story of a New Name
"You too may find yourself falling for Lila,
or even Elena, the author's namesake who ---
like any sixteen year old ---
can change her mind in a minute,
hate those she loves,
love those she hates,
even give away her own passionate heart-throb
as a present for her best friend."

Three Great Reviews of the Past
Five Old New Titles
"As soon as man becomes
aware of doing good and avoiding evil,
he is no longer perfectly good.
Good is good when it has become
good for nothing."

Owls
"'The bottom of an owl's nest makes a nice home,'
says Ms. Berger, although we believe
the word nice here 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.'"

Madness: A Bipolar Life
"Then there is Kate Millett's
Looney-Bin Trip, published in 1990,
which takes us through the nightmare
of not only being crazy, but being
in the hands of the crazy-industry,
with their careful offices, their 1960s
operating cells, and acres an acres of lithium."

LETTERS
Penguin Aux Gousses D'ail

MORE LETTERS
Pest Control at RALPH

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
Your $500,000

ARTICLES
Jean-Paul Sartre
"It was there that he helped establish
a review of literature,
politics, and the weather,
Les Temps Modernes ---
which was was supposed
to be a quarterly but
came out twice a week
because of Sartre's constant
use of speed."

READINGS
Among Russians
"Lenin lay there bigger than I had imagined,
the hair fairer, sandy and
almost gone from his head.
The skin glowed with a glassy,
wax-like sheen, unmodulated, textureless.
I understood why some Russians suspect
this is not Lenin's body at all,
but an effigy."

Among Russians II
"'England... England...' he mused,
ransacking his memory for
any fact or image.
'Ah yes! Churchill!'
He poured out more wine
from a huge earthenware jug.
'I've seen your Queen,
Mrs. Churchill,
on our television.
She had white hair and
was very beautiful,
but her head was
sticking out of a tank.'"

POETRY
Four from
Word of Mouth
Two Visits in One Day
"If your aunt keeps talking too much, like she
usually does, we'll tell her that we just got
back from the cemetery, & that should shut her up.
She never goes there, & it shows, because
the more you visit the dead the less you have to say."

March 16 [1996]
"The weather is on a lottery
system and I've lucked out two
Saturdays in a row its warm
in Tampa where I want to eat
paella and smoke a cigar and
wonder if Tampax was invented
here I remember the year
my favorite song was "All of Me."

OUR NEW BOOK
(Hot Off the Press)
The Noisiest Book Review in the Known World
has just been published.
It contains 200 or so of what we believe
to be the best articles, readings, reviews and poems
from this magazine from our first years to now.
Here you will find all necessary information
on ordering this two-volume set
which one critic called "magic."

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"

SUBSCRIBE
Help perpetuate honest, noisy, pesky book reviews.
With your $25 subscription, you get
a free copy of one or more of the titles from
Mho & Mho Works