Book Reviews by Daniel Brown The acclaim surrounding Joyce Carol Oates‘ newest novel, The Accursed, is much deserved: it is the best novel of 2013 to date and replete with complexities yet utterly readable–it is actually a keep-you-up-at-night page-turner, and at nearly 675 pages, that’s a lot of pages to turn. Oates is probably the [...]

Letter From The Editor The April issue of aeqai contains a good number of reviews of shows in this region, but also a few more essays and letters. Many aeqai writers are interested in pursuing issues which may grow out of reviews they write , or of general issues and ideas in the general area [...]

The March issue of aeqai should inform all our readers and members of the arts communities here how to get a good handle on the directions into which aeqai is moving.  We hope that you like the mix of articles that will become more regular and familiar as we meet visual artists and writers in other cities [...]

Magical Realism Editor’s Note: Deborah Morrissey-McGoff’s new paintings are included in a group show at The Miller Gallery in Hyde Park titled “Local Artists”.  Aeqai is thus reprinting a feature that Editor Daniel Brown wrote for The Artist’s Magazine on Morrissey-McGoff’s paintings . www.artistsmagazine.com  -  September 2010 Influenced by Italian Renaissance masters and naïve painters, [...]

Camille Paglia, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars Book review by Daniel Brown Camille Paglia is herself a cultural necessity, an icon of exceptional brilliance, a no-nonsense analyst of Western culture and ideas of the first rank. She trucks no theoretical hijinks, refuses labels, isn’t associated with any particular school [...]

Letter from the Editor Greater Cincinnati visual arts venues returned in earnest in February, with the holidays laid to rest. The February issue of aeqai should reflect the wealth of exhibitions, the variety of talent, and the very different types of art being made and shown, both in our own region and nationally. Aeqai is [...]

Book Review:  The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg ~ Daniel Brown   Early in the new year, a young novelist’s new , or sometimes first, book is published and surprises me with its quality; last year, it was Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds, a splendid look at an American man and a Bangladeshi woman who meet over the [...]

Letter from the Editor The January aeqai is full of reviews, as well as a few new regular columns and some essays. A lot of institutions and most commercial galleries hold their December or fall shows through the first few weeks of January, as the remains of the holidays (bills, in most cases) wend their [...]

End of the Year Best Fiction of 2012 Although The New York Times Books Review’s editors found 2012 to be an exceptionally exciting year for new fiction, I found the opposite to be the case:  2012 was one of the weakest years , overall, for new fiction in over a decade.  Of course, good and some [...]

We are pleased to bring you the December issue of aeqai, probably our largest issue ever, and perhaps our most comprehensive.  One of our primary goals is to cover as many aspects of the visual arts communities in Greater Cincinnati as we can, in each issue.  This aeqai again reflects the richness and diversity of programming and [...]

Happy Thanksgiving Short Story Scene by Margaret Cummins The small West Side neighborhood is quiet in the early morning of November 22nd, 2010. The dark green Subarus bump down Cherry Avenue, on a mission to pick up the last-minute necessities for the lavish dinners taking place that evening. A woman runs by with her black [...]

May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes The contemporary family saga novel has been reinvigorated by writers’ awareness of the complexities of the merged family. Typically, remarriages force children who may barely know one another to live under the same roof as they adjust to parents’ new partners, new schedules, demands, “lifestyles”. How such children of [...]

Dear Readers, Fotofocus provides the content for nearly all of the October issue of AEQAI. This first celebration of photography’s central place in contemporary art and culture is responsible for approximately 75 exhibitions in the Greater Cincinnati region. The shows range from the regionally acclaimed, the nationally, and even internationally renowned artists. AEQAI is one [...]

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon When a great writer like Michael Chabon disappoints, the disappointment is that much greater, because our expectations are high about virtually anything he writes, and because contemporary American fiction has been so strikingly poor in 2012. The real Telegraph Avenue became infamous in the l960s as a street in Berkely, [...]

Letter from the Editor ÆQAI resumes its regular monthly edition with this September issue.  We welcome everyone to a new and fresh fall art season, and are pleased to offer a number of reviews, essays, profiles and special guest columns.  The entire visual arts community is now preparing for the region-wide celebration of photography, fotofocus, [...]

Editor’s note: Since this is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, and since her fame continues to grow ( a new twist includes some feminist writers  claiming her as one of theirs ex post facto), aeqai is reprinting an article I wrote in 2004 and was picked up by Weston (Conn.) Monthly, where the [...]

The much–and deservedly–praised English writer Martin Amis, newly moved to Brookyln (his wife is American), offers his latest novel, Lionel ASBO:  State of England.  Although it’s nearly impossible to critique or argue the quality of Amis’ prose, and one delights in his splendid word choices and tight structures, this novel falls flat and is a [...]

I remember when Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes were still the angry young men of English literature.  All three are now in their sixties, and their early promise has more than panned out.  But England is still giving us young writers of great merit; two of them, Jo Baker and Harriet Lane, have [...]

  By: Daniel Brown Uniting gestural abstraction and calligraphic mark making, Frank Satogata celebrates nature’s beautiful juxtapositions. TWO APPROACHES to the globalized art market, though widely different, have evolved on parallel tracks. On the one hand, there’s an internationalized art market predicated on our consumerist culture and the consequent adoration of and obsession with American [...]

By: Daniel Brown Donna Talerico wows us, once again, with her new paintings of France, currently on view at Greenwich House Gallery in O’Bryonville.  Her annual trip to France has been generating some of the most energetic and engaging paintings in this region, where she lives.  Talerico manages to be both an Impressionist and an [...]

Book Review By: Daniel Brown Paul Theroux may best be known as America’s most engaging travel writer; the books that first brought him to my attention were The Great Railway Bizarre and The Old Patagonian Express, which he wrote almost four decades ago.  Like Joan Didion, Theroux’s career includes writing both non-fiction and fiction, and [...]

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Review by Daniel Brown Texan Ben Fountain has written the best novel of 2012 to date.  Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is an anti war book for our times; its M.A.S.H – like black humor mitigates the underlying horror of the Iraq war.  Fountain proposes that ten soldiers, currently fighting [...]

Dear Readers, We are happy to bring you the May 2012 issue of ÆQAI, your journal of the visual arts in Greater Cincinnati. Although we are nearing the end of the art season, which runs parallel to the school calendar, there is no lessening of interesting shows or of a richness in the overall tapestry [...]

Still life is the most problematic—and most abstract—of genres, as the paintings seem to lack the grandeur associated with landscapes or with figures that can assume allegorical or mythological-religious resonance. Because the objects depicted are taken from ordinary life, however, they intimately speak to our daily existence and to our interior lives. Sheldon Tapley revitalizes, [...]

Possibly because England is such a small and relatively isolated country, the literature that predominates, both past and present seem to be the relatively modest-in-scope psychological drama.  Many of England’s finest living novelists clearly continue to be influenced by the great Jane Austen, the novel’s greatest depicter of manners and morals in all of literature.  [...]

André Aciman was born into an upper middle class-to-rich Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt.  He has described the nearly Chekovian life that his extended family lived in the waning days of a tolerant and multicultural Egypt.  As anti-Semitism rose in Egypt, a manipulative political movement meant to target “outsiders” and “foreigners”, various members of the [...]

Every now and again, the literary and/or publishing worlds discover or rediscover an author, living or dead, whose writings are so exceptional that they change the way we read, understand the world, and reexamine the act of writing itself.  Three or four years ago, I read Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, in which this recently dead [...]

Every month, ÆQAI will be presenting one book review, generally contemporary fiction, for our readers’ edification and enjoyment .  A lot of back and forth occurs between and amongst novels, the world of film, and visual culture in general.  We begin this series with Love and Shame and Love, a novel by Peter Orner (Little, [...]

Editor’s Note:  The following is reprinted from the October 2011 issue of The Artist’s Magazine. Stacie Seuberling’s landscapes may seem like sets for Romantic ballets; the movement of trees equates to the movement of bodies in space; the lines convey form against curtains of color. Smaller in scale than a stage set, however, their magic [...]

The year 2011 in new fiction began as bleakly as any in recent memory.  By the end of summer, only two or three novels seemed even to be somewhat good – and we need to watch literary/politically correct trends, to make certain we’re not simply reading what’s been declared good for us/for the victimized but [...]

The Artists of “Narrative Figuration” discuss their work. Editor’s Note:  Because Daniel Brown is both Editor of Aeqai and the guest curator for the exhibition “Narrative Figuration” at The Weston Gallery in the Aronoff Center, it is Aeqai’s policy that our reviewers not review his shows.  Therefore, we have asked the five artists in the [...]

Ted Borman at The Miller Gallery Ted Borman’s astonishing new paintings, Ghost Clouds, are his most evolved work to date. They manage to combine rich references to art history and to contemporary popular culture wittily, intelligently, and seamlessly. Selecting a deliberately faux-naif painting style, Borman’s work is reminiscent of other artists prone to radical reductionism and [...]

At The Weston Gallery Todd Reynolds’ oils’ and watercolors’ most salient contemporary features depict an America in which chronic violence is implied, hope is in abeyance. His quasi-narrative, usually large scale paintings rip the niceties and pieties off of middle class life, portraying, instead, a near-Surreal world of low-life characters, drug-induced or -inspired people in [...]