The Believer: Vol. 8 No. 2

The Believer Vol. 8 No. 2 is the February 2010 issue.

Contents:

Going to the Tigers
by Robert Cohen
Might some new style be necessary, one that’s neither “plain” nor “lyrical” but dissolves the line between all such easy polarities?

García Márquez Goes to the Dentist
by Julio Villanueva Chang
As John Cheever once said, a story is “what you tell yourself in a dentist’s office while you’re waiting for an appointment.”

What You Can’t Learn Collecting Esoteric Books
by Andrea Richards
Uncle Vernie’s forgotten library reveals deep riches from the fringes of intellectual history, including several “harsh and gnarly cleanses.”

The Bountiful Continent
by Casey Walker
Is William T. Vollmann’s study of the Imperial Valley his Moby-Dick? Or is it a 1,300-page letter to a woman who broke his heart?

Becoming a Lady
by Amelie Gillette
The time-honored tradition of transforming girls into self-confident, slightly more polite, definitely less-drunk young women.

A Roundtable Discussion with Daniel Alarcón, Eduardo Halfon, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Three prizewinning Latino novelists living in the U.S. discuss the implications of writing in Spanish, English, and elsewhere.

Trent Reznor
interviewed by Brandon Bussolini
How eighteen years in the cornfields of rural Pennsylvania with nothing but AM/FM radio created Nine Inch Nails.

Stanley Crawford in correspondence with Noy Holland
An epistolary conversation between two great writers who grow things: she plants bulbs, he harvests 500 pounds of garlic a year.

Sarah Waters
micro-interviewed by Peter Terzian
A celebrated historical novelist has just published her first work without lesbian characters. The new book features ghosts.

No Opera: A new poem
by Derek Walcott

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

Sedaratives
by Bob Saget

American Gothic: A new poem
by Virginia Konchan

Best European Fiction 2010
reviewed by Miranda F. Mellis

Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed
reviewed by Scott Indrisek

Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming
reviewed by Don Waters

Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask
reviewed by Andrew Ervin

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay
reviewed by Meehan Crist

“Comics”
by Alvin Buenaventura

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Major American Renaissance Writers Who Changed Their Names
by Damion Searls

Schema: Nine Famous Hypochondriacs
by Brian Dillon