{"id":74889,"date":"2026-06-05T20:31:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T00:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=74889"},"modified":"2026-06-05T21:15:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T01:15:47","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-74-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2026\/06\/05\/i-arrogantly-recommend-74-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend .. . #74 by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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R. Crumb illustration from Art & Beauty<\/p><\/div>\n

i arrogantly recommend…#72 is a mostly monthly review column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially decrease the number of views on screens by people who have no use for such things.”<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Support the Small Press! Buy Small, Buy local!<\/p>\n

Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"Sa\u2019iba<\/a><\/strong>
\nAlis al-Bustani \/ Marilyn Booth
\nOxford World\u2019s Classics<\/p>\n

Sa\u2019iba<\/strong> is the first known, published example of extended fictional narration by an Arab woman, first published in 1891, when Alis al-Bustani was 21. The youngest of eleven children, al-Bustani was raised in Beirut by accomplished parents who were influential educationists in the region. The text of Sa\u2019iba is short (64 pages) but is accompanied by an introduction by the scholar and translator Marilyn Booth, two appendices, and extensive footnotes, all of which provide cultural and familial history, context, influences, and significance as it relates to al-Bustami and her fictional world.<\/p>\n

Although the issues raised by the novel\u2014such as women\u2019s rights, including self-determination\u2014were debated throughout the Middle East during the time of its composition, al-Bustani sets the novel in Istanbul, providing a geographical (and thus psychological) cushion between it and where her audience lives, making it safe to discuss, since it then becomes a novel about what is occurring \u201cover there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protagonist, Sa\u2019iba is a young woman from an upper middle-class family. The family has progressive values for the time, and Sa\u2019iba has been well-educated. Having progressive values does not mean her parents have turned their backs on tradition. Consistent with the combination of time, place, and cultural values of the novel\u2019s setting, Sa\u2019iba has been betrothed since childhood to her first cousin, Farid.<\/p>\n

As the novel begins, we learn that Sa\u2019iba has declined marrying her first-cousin for someone else. Instead, she has committed herself to a man named Lutfi. While both Farid and Lutfi also come from well-to-do, upper-middle-class homes that provided them with access to a good education, Farid, unemployed and only 17, has already spent most of his inheritance on gambling and other habits of dissolute living (except for drinking, in a rare concern for Islamic law); whereas Lutfi, who is in the military, uses his money to buy a house, furnish it, and hire servants. Sa\u2019iba herself, as a child of progressive parents of a certain income, also enjoys a good education, studies seriously, and has a disciplined mindset that makes Lutfi\u2019s marriage proposal more attractive than Farid\u2019s presumed claims upon her, even if he is sincerely in love with her, too. Delusionally so.<\/p>\n

Sa\u2019iba and Lufti wed. Enraged, Farid enlists the help of two allies: Sa\u2019iba\u2019s maid and Boulos, a con artist. Marjana, a former slave who continues living with the family she has been a part of her entire life (as apparently did many people of the Ottoman Empire who were legally free once slavery was abolished). Marjana promises Farid to help him compromise Sa\u2019iba so that Lufti will divorce her. Boulos\u2014much more cleaver than Farid\u2014helps Farid devise and fulfill his schemes to place Sa\u2019iba in a situation in which she will be divorced and socially ostracized unless she marries him.<\/p>\n

Even though Lutfi has the eye of an innocent toward his love, he also has a naif\u2019s sense of honor and dignity; namely, he takes statements from others he trusts at face value. Thus, he is inclined to believe rumors rather than his own experiences after he begins receiving anonymous messages implying that Sa\u2019iba in being unfaithful to him\u2014for in this culture, women are presumed guilty by their mere existence. Even devoted lovers find their interpretations of their own experiences twisted by this cultural assumption. Can it be overcome so that Sa\u2019iba\u2019s reputation remains untarnished, and with it Lutfi\u2019s own standing within the community when confronted by accusations of infidelity against his wife?<\/p>\n

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\"\"Ruins and Other Poems<\/strong>
\nSamer Abu Hawwash \/ Huda J. Fakhreddine
\nWorld Poetry Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash writes about losses suffered and endured since Israel\u2019s Nakba against them. Taken away from the Palestinians\u2014land, homes, folkways, community but not yet hope, despite the desolate spread ahead of those left behind.<\/p>\n

There, on a land, we were told was not our land,
\nunder a sky, we were told, was not our sky,
\nmy people life their death.<\/p>\n

My people write the names of their children
\non arms and legs, so they can find them
\nlater among the massacred. \u2014”My People\u201d<\/p>\n

Families bear almost unimaginable grief. In \u201cThe Final City,\u201d a grandfather mourns his granddaughter, presumably killed by a bomb:<\/p>\n

In the ruins of this final city,
\nin this night of nights,
\nby your small bed
\ntorn apart by a monster. . .<\/p>\n

With these scarce hands I cradle you.
\nI embrace you and lift you up
\nas far as my heart can reach.
\nHow light you are now, my little one, and how heavy this air.
\nHow heavy this body
\nthat once belonged to you.<\/p>\n

The main poetic sequence is the titular Ruins, a three-part memorial devoted to a beloved homeland turned into a hellscape that nonetheless resists the disaster befallen his people, irrevocably tied to a particular land:<\/p>\n

These stones won\u2019t speak
\nand they won\u2019t go away,
\nbut the light will persist, falling
\non the absent, the broken, and the devoured,
\nas if an immortal wolf
\ngnaws and gnaws
\nat what\u2019s left
\nof this wall,
\nreturning it
\nto the primordial howl.<\/p>\n

Clear-eyed, restrained, and dignified, Abu Hawwash\u2019s witness to atrocity is beautifully rendered by Huda J. Fakhreddine\u2019s translation.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Smoke Drifts<\/strong>
\nNadia Anjuman \/ Diana Arterian + Marina Omar
\nWorld Poetry Books<\/p>\n

Nadia Anjuman was born and raised in Afghanistan during the Taliban years, studied literature in secret (under the ruse of attending a sewing circle, one of the few activities for women the Taliban allows), briefly attended university while the Taliban\u2019s power was low, and was murdered by her husband. The Taliban insisted that Anjuman\u2019s father forgive his daughter\u2019s murderer so that he could be released from prison and raise his child, who was less than a year old when its mother was killed.
\nShe was a prodigy who began writing poetry in her teens, her first collection published when she was only 20. Her second book was released shortly before her murder. Smoke Drifts brings together the poems from those two books, Flower of Smoke and A Basket of Doubt. \u201cPrison\u201d describes a common reaction by women to the oppressive Taliban regime: Escape.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has feathers and the strength
\nflees in an instant\u2014she spreaders her wings
\nand shoots from this nameless place like a bullet. . .<\/p>\n

If you have no wings
\ngo on foot
\nIf you have no legs, leap into the dark
\nYou must plunge into the sea
\nYou must ask the wind
\nOn any path that can lead away from this prison
\nyou have to escape
\nyou have to escape<\/p>\n

If the horror of living under the Taliban hasn\u2019t lasted centuries, just knowing what has come before and what will come after, just enduring a lifetime is enough. \u201cBitter Stories\u201d describes that condition:<\/p>\n

Bitter stories,
\nyou have made homes of our hearts for a lifetime
\nThese sorrowful eyes, these sallow cheeks
\nare the grim marks of your presence
\nBranches of sorrow,
\na hundred springs come and a hundred autumns go
\nbuds wither with scorched hearts
\na hundred blockages clear and a hundred caravans pass
\nPharoah dies and Nimrod\u2019s tale ends
\nyet you are still green and fresh
\nas if just sprouted from the dirt<\/p>\n

Translators Diana Arterian and Marina Omar do admirably well at crafting living poetry that breathe into the mind\u2019s ear a presence that became tragic when any sense of hope she once held was taken once her soul departed her body.<\/p>\n

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\"\"The Red Wind Howls<\/strong><\/a>
\nTsering D\u00f6ndrup \/ Christopher Peacock
\nColumbia University Press<\/p>\n

In 1958, the Chinese Communist Party slaughtered over 120,000 Tibetans in a region called Amdo where an uprising occurred against the Party\u2019s attempt to uproot and eliminate the people\u2019s traditional ways of life and religion as nomads and Buddhists. Another 50,000 citizens of Amdo were sent to labor camps, where the majority died serving their 10-year sentences. Mao\u2019s directed mass-murder in Amdo remains, today, illegal to discuss in mainland China. The fact that so few people from Amdo survived has helped ensure that Tibetans and Chinese alike have forgotten the uprising, assuming they have heard of it at all.<\/p>\n

Tsering D\u00f6ndrup, born in 1961, grew up in Amdo, where the slaughter was fresh in the minds of its citizens, since every family there was affected by it, and they still suffered at the hands of violent government-supported intercessions into daily affairs by vigilante groups set up to enforce Mao\u2019s policies and invent enemies to persecute locally. The events comprising the uprising and its suppression were recorded by D\u00f6ndrup in interviews he held with survivors as background notes for The Red Wind Howls.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s protagonist, Alak Drong (which means something like \u201cMinister Yak\u201d), begins the tale with his release from labor camp and his memories of the events leading to his imprisonment, and the Maoist revolutionaries who forced him to denounce his faith as a practicing Buddhist monk. No one is safe from being targeted by self-appointed guardians of the revolutionary light, and everybody eventually succumbs to betraying others\u2014even kin and spouses\u2014if it means another day of life for themselves. On the one hand, everyone is a hypocrite. On the other hand, suicides claim as many as 10 souls a day, apart from those who die of malnutrition, overwork, exhaustion, and beatings.
\nOutside of the labor camps, mass starvation is rife throughout the region.<\/p>\n

For the first few years of Alak Drong\u2019s imprisonment, much of the labor is devoted to deforesting the region. The government assumed that the forests could be transformed into farmland for barley. But barley and other crops do not bear fruit (or grow particularly well) a mile or more above sea level. (The camp where Alak Drong works, in the Tibetan Plateau, is 11,000 feet above sea level.)
\nDuring Drong\u2019s sentence\u2014as citizens are arrested, sent to camp, returned home, re-arrested and \u201cstruggled against\u201d (i.e., beaten and tortured by their neighbors), and sent to camp again\u2014mutual trust among neighbors is replaced by calculation. While a person might enjoy the opportunity to avenge himself against someone who wronged him in the past, the opportunity for revenge is often only temporary, and fortunes turn again.<\/p>\n

Out of the labor camp, back home, Drong\u2019s community under the thumb of the CCP with its rigid, unrealistic agricultural production goals and sense of ideological purity, his situation isn\u2019t much improved, although nutritional levels are marginally better and the work less battering. Mao is dead but the CCP is still in power. And it doesn\u2019t apologize to anyone.<\/p>\n

Although D\u00f6ndrup was already an established, well-regarded author when the novel was published in 2006, he could find no publisher willing to risk publishing. So he published it himself. Using the fact that the self-published version lacked an ISBN, the CCP first banned the book, then upped the ante by revoking his passport (he can no longer leave the country), reducing his salary (forcing him into early retirement), and prohibiting him from accepting further literary awards. He has published additional works since The Read Wind Howls<\/strong>, but the punishments remain in place.<\/p>\n

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\"\"I Deliver Parcels in Beijing<\/a><\/strong>
\nHu Anyan \/ Jack Hargreaves
\nAstra House<\/p>\n

Hu Anyan\u2019s account of his life as a gig worker in China shows that, yes, there\u2019s employment enough for anybody who wants work, but for unskilled workers that employment is precarious and remunerative enough for subsistence-level living. Apart from the ability to live with one\u2019s parents when times are difficult and personal expenses could stand a further round of cuts, China offers no safety net, no unemployment checks.<\/p>\n

When I Deliver Parcels in Beijing <\/strong>begins, Hu is working 26 days a month, 11 hours a day, to make 270 yuan a day, or just under $40. Breaking his costs down\u2014set fees and penalties\u2014Hu calculates that taking time to eat lunch or urinate serve only as drags on his income, so he forgoes them. Wages earned by package-delivery workers in Beijing, per package: 32\u00a2 (contract workers without benefits) and 26\u00a2 (company employees with benefits)\u2014if the packages are undamaged when they arrive and if the people who ordered them don\u2019t ask to return them. Damaged packages must be paid for by the courier. The decision to return a product may occur only after the person has opened and unpacked the parcel (while the courier stands and waits). Once rejected, the courier must repackage it the same way it came out\u2014all time out of the courier\u2019s schedule, eating into the ability to make the next 26\u00a2 or 32\u00a2 of the day\u2019s wages. Sometimes customers expect couriers wait a half hour or more in the lobby before leaving their apartment to retrieve their package. And of course the courier doesn\u2019t make any money while sitting around.<\/p>\n

Although Hu doesn\u2019t have a college education, he makes use of his literacy. During the first downtime he\u2019s enjoyed for years, after one company he works for goes belly up, he reads translations of Robert Musil\u2019s The Man without Qualities<\/strong> and Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/strong>, which certainly demonstrates one aspect of his tenacity and self-discipline. Later, he falls in love with such 20th-century American realists as Hemingway and Carver.<\/p>\n

After moving to Shanghai from Beijing, Hu works in a high-end bike shop owned by a woman who know nothing about bikes but has two bike technicians who do. Compared to his work as a courier, the bike shop is easier and the pay is better and consistent\u2014even if he is still working 12-hour days, six days a week. Unfortunately, the shop owner is flighty, indecisive, argumentative, and alienating, so her employees don\u2019t stay long and sometimes steal bikes to act out their anger. After a year of what is ultimately an untenable situation, he leaves.<\/p>\n

After turns as a gas station attendant, stock boy, and so forth, he and friend open a clothing business, doing well enough to open two locations. But after two years of confinement to a windowless shopping mall, working every day of the week, Hu decides he\u2019s had enough. But during the slow hours of those two years, Hu continues reading and takes up writing\u2014evening submitting short stories to publications, some of them even published and paid for. During the pandemic he gets serious about writing, and the rest is history. His story is now available in at least 16 other countries. One hopes he now has enough money to engage full-time with his avocation.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Little Yu & the Treelings: Lost in Peach Blossom Paradise<\/a><\/strong>
\nXiong Liang \/ Chloe Garcia Roberts
\nElsewhere Editions<\/p>\n

Peach Blossom Paradise has been a part of Chinese legend for centuries. In the original tale, a lone wanderer explores a cave whose entrance he discovered at the base of a mountain in the midst of a forest. As it turns out, the cave extends through the mountain, to the other side, where it opens upon an Eden-like area whose people have no sense of war, hatred, division, or lack of necessities. This is Peach Blossom Paradise, a place where peach trees are always in bloom, signifying spring, re-birth, newness and the purity that comes with.<\/p>\n

After some time living among the people of this paradise, the traveler decides he must return home. The inhabitants of Peach Blossom Paradise warmly see him off but beg him to not tell anybody about the place, which would be ruined if trampled by an endless stream of visitors. Although the traveler promises not to tell, of course he breaks his promise and tells everyone he can upon his arrival home about his discovery.<\/p>\n

The good news is that nobody has discovered the cave at the base of the mountain the traveler walked through, even though they have tried again and again over the centuries.<\/p>\n

Little Yu is a young girl who sets off to discover Peach Blossom Paradise. Her first hint that it may be near occurs when Little Yu notices peach blossoms floating in a river that runs through the forest she is exploring. As it turns out, her explorations are series of tests the Treelings have devised to keep away strangers. The Treelings\u2014short people, smaller than Yu\u2014are the descendants of the original inhabitants of Peach Blossom Paradise. Yu finds herself tested for qualities of bravery, resourcefulness, wits, and courage.<\/p>\n

The final test she must pass is to blend in so well with her surroundings that she (with the assistance of a Treeling) can sneak past the Hidden Master and enter Peach Blossom Paradise. Although the book doesn\u2019t say so explicitly, native Chinese speakers will recognize that the qualities in a person that allow them to enter Peach Blossom Paradise are those that a Buddhist must practice to reach nirvana and thus become a Buddha. A Westerner might be content to describe Little Yu\u2019s actions as becoming one with nature.<\/p>\n

Author and artist Xiong Liang has won multiple awards for his works, has seen movies made of some of his books, and had his books displayed in Japan and Britain as examples of international children\u2019s stories. Poet Chloe Garcia Roberts has a knack both for producing excellent translations and finding excellent storytellers to translate, as with her translation of Feather<\/strong><\/a> by Cao Wenxuan and Roger Mello, which won an Outstanding International Book award in 2019, which I reviewed several years ago.<\/p>\n

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\"\"The Narrow Road of Oku<\/strong><\/a>
\nBasho \/ Meredith McKinney
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

The Narrow Road of Oku<\/strong> is Basho\u2019s travelog from 1689 combining terse narrative description with haiku and haikai regarding the portion of Japan\u2019s coastline he followed, accompanied by his disciple, Sora, who also contributes some poems. Over the course of five months, the pair traveled along the almost-inaccessible northernmost portion of Japan, enjoying and carefully noting the flora and fauna, visiting current and ruined temples and castles, climbing mountains, fording rivers, discovering ancient writing on monuments, not infrequently brought to tears as they are spiritually overwhelmed by their sense of place within historical and cosmological continuity.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Ah!merica<\/strong>
\nAllen Ginsberg
\nIsolarii <\/a><\/p>\n

Taken from lectures at the Naropa Institute given by Allen Ginsberg between 1974-1997, Ah!merica delineates a line of poetic influence from William Blake to William Carlos Williams\u2014with frequent reference to Walt Whitman. From sources of poetic inspiration to expressions of that inspiration, Ginsberg looks for the least self-consciously wrought works, works that capture a sense of spontaneity and naturalness, qualities Ginsberg associates with honesty and authenticity. Discipline teaches us which of the lines written transmit what was seen versus what we think we should see: the poetic consists of the emotional truth.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Art & Beauty<\/strong><\/a>
\nR. Crumb
\nFantagraphics<\/p>\n

Gathering all three issues of Art & Beauty<\/strong>, this magazine was R. Crumb\u2019s ode to traditional realism in illustrated renderings of the human form, accompanied by quotations by artists and art historians, presented in Crumb\u2019s fine lettering. His source material includes live models, in situ sketching, photographs he\u2019s taken, been given, or clipped from magazines, most featuring the same sturdy, big-boned gals he\u2019s favored his entire career. That pantheon now includes the tennis player Serena Williams, whose image is the book\u2019s cover, and weight lifters. No comic exaggeration, only pure adoration for the robust female figure. No stories, just beautiful women from their teens to their 60s. Some nudity, no sex.<\/p>\n

Although Crumb\u2019s technique is impeccable and his homage to female bodies sincere, Crumb being Crumb can\u2019t but help include side winks toward the audience, conjuring the anodyne prose of figure-drawing books that mimic highfalutin aesthetic discussion in the name of Art to distract from their images\u2019 clearly erotic potential, as if settling theoretical disputes is the prime force of creativity. Thus, we have Crumb ventriloquizing in a caption to an image, \u201cDespite the relentless drive toward elimination of the object in modern art movements, the female form continues to demand attention\u201d\u2014a demand rewarded by Crumb\u2019s depiction of a woman\u2019s buttocks mounting a bicycle seat. Mr. Snoid would appreciate the juxtaposition.
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