Frank Cassese’s debut novel is a harrowing account of a young man’s relationship with his adored sister. Ocean Beach (No Record Press, 2014) explores the porous boundary between love and obsession from the point of view of Peter, a disaffected son of distant Italian-American literati, whose unchecked idealism threatens to poison his reality. When does love become destructive? Cassese’s introspective book occupies itself with this question and other, more troublesome questions about guilt and existentialism. In an interview with English Kills Review, Cassese discusses the writing process that resulted in his first novel.

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“Angie felt like a throwback to another era, like she hadn’t evolved at the same rate as her classmates and friends.”

Bridgett M. Davis spoke these words Tuesday night as she read from the first chapter of her second novel, Into the Go-Slow (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2014). Davis’ sophomore publication tells the story of Angie, the college-aged protagonist, as she investigates the traces left by her mercurial older sister who died mysteriously while on vacation in Lagos, Nigeria. The more readers learn of Ella, the ill-fated sister, the more apparent her influence on Angie becomes. Into the Go-Slow is a story of Pan-Africanism in the 70’s, 80’s, and beyond, a story about pursuing your roots, no matter where they might take you.

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New York might get a bad rap for sky-high rents, but at least it isn’t Antwerp. Antwerp in the 1860’s, that is. A vitriolic diatribe written by Charles Baudelaire against the defenseless little country of Belgium appears in the latest issue of the Pushcart Prize-hoarding magazine Conjunctions. According to Baudelaire, the 19th century poet and essayist, low rents were the only things the “ragamuffin” of a state had going for it in the mid-1800’s.

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