Ecce Mon­strum, Jeremy Biles’s study of Georges Bataille, got a nice review by Tomasz Swo­boda over at H-Ideas recently. Here’s the upshot:

All in all, among recent stud­ies on Bataille, Biles’s book is the one that per­haps approaches best Bataille’s thought while propos­ing new inter­pre­ta­tions of his work. Indeed, read­ers who are not famil­iar with Bataille’s work will be rather well intro­duced to its main aspects. At the same time, spe­cial­ized read­ers will find in Biles’s book refor­mu­la­tions and rein­ter­pre­ta­tions that will likely become piv­otal in Batail­lean studies.

The book came out with Ford­ham Uni­ver­sity Press last year and is avail­able for pur­chase (at an awfully steep $65) here.

A memo to all inter­ested par­ties: I’ll be read­ing this Sunday, May 25, at The Charleston Bar in Buck­town (2076 N. Hoyne, to be precise).

The read­ing, which is hap­pen­ing under the aus­pices of both the Sunday Salon Chicago series and the Pil­crow Lit­er­ary Fes­ti­val, fea­tures fic­tion edi­tors from Chicago lit­er­ary mag­a­zines read­ing their own work. The other writer-​editors on the card are Mike Zapata of Make, Simon A. Smith of Bruiser Review, and Michael Newirth of Fifth Wednes­day Journal.

I’ll be read­ing a bit from my novel-in-progress. The read­ing starts at 7:30pm and shouldn’t last much past 9pm. If you’re in town and avail­able, come out for the read­ing and I’ll buy you a beer…

From John Wilkinson’s fan letter-cum-review of Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy,” a long poem first pub­lished in Chicago Review’s British Poetry Issue (53:1) and repub­lished as a chap­book by Barque Press:

The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remark­able poem in Eng­lish pub­lished this cen­tury. Having seen the shell-​shocked response of two very dif­fer­ent audi­ences I am at a loss to account for the speech­less­ness unless we’ve been out­done in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assum­ing there is some kind of oper­a­tive ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonethe­less. A pas­sion for new British poetry was admit­ted to me more than a year after this poem had been det­o­nated in their heads, by some grad­u­ate stu­dents on a major poet­ics pro­gram in the US. But given the absence of print or inter­net com­men­tary, I feel com­pelled to write a fan letter rather than a cri­tique, and to say a pos­si­ble poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I sup­pose I can go and grow vegetables.

60 Min­utes is pro­fil­ing Part­ners In Health/Zanmi Las­ante on Sunday night. The orga­ni­za­tion, which is run by the ines­timable Paul Farmer and Ophe­lia Dahl, does med­ical work in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Mexico, Rwanda, and Boston. It was the sub­ject of Tracy Kidder’s excel­lent book Moun­tains beyond Mountains.

If you haven’t heard about PIH before, be sure to check it out. The show airs at 7pm on CBS. After that you can go and give them some of your money here.

UPDATE [5/5]: Video of the seg­ment is now avail­able here.