New Books In Literature

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways