Peter Stephan Jungk The Perfect American Michael Hofmann, tr. Other Press This engaging fictionalized biography of Walt Disney recounts Austrian cartoonist Wilhelm Dantine’s obsession to tarnish the reputation of the man who fired him. A darker look at the iconic Disney persona, Peter Stephan Jungk fixes a unique gaze upon a man who was very much as haunted as he was famous. W. Nick Hill And We’d Understand Crows Laughing: Poems (1997–2010) Dos Madres Press Often intimate and scaling a wide range of emotions and settings, this compilation of poetry serves as a distinct picture of the natural world. W. Nick Hill encapsulates time and place through descriptive imagery and surprising candor. “And we’d understand crows laughing, / live safe in the embrace of elements, / grateful to the seed for guidance.” Nota Bene is located in Sarajevo, the narrator’s hometown, and Drvenik, a Croatian village on the Adriatic where the narrator spends his formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. The stories, on the other hand, are set all over the world and the former Yugoslavia, after Bosnian refugees escaped from the war in the 1990s in an attempt to start a new life. Unlike the novella, the stories are not unified by the narrator; instead, their subject and somewhat typified characters—disillusioned, unadjusted, and heartbroken exiles— bring the stories together. “When I Was Born” is, actually , arranged as a series of twentyone vignettes, the most memorable moments of narrator Miljenko’s childhood that recall the bildungsroman , and whose great humor and skewed logic stem from the narrator ’s age. In all of the vignettes but the last, which gives the book its title, the narrator’s viewpoint is of a precocious, observant child who not only successfully navigates his parents’ complicated relationship, unusual living arrangements, colorful family members, and problems at school but also deeply comprehends life. Death, introduced in the first segment in which the narrator describes his birth, is both the novella’s recurring theme and the obsession of Miljenko’s childhood: “Relatively early on, when I was five or six, I came to the conclusion that everything connected with death sucked pretty bad and so decided to shelve my threats of dying, at least until I solved the problem of God’s existence.” The deaths of his grandfather , dog, and a young cousin—to name just a few—force the narrator to face his own mortality and, paradoxically, form his own identity. This mixture of a child’s perspective and language, as well as the fascination with death, makes “When I Was Born” a multilayered and complex text, which demonstrates why Jergović is one of the most prominent Croatian authors and one of the most translated European writers. Damjana Mraović-O’Hare Carson-Newman College Don Lee. The Collective. New York. W.W. Norton. 2012. isbn 9780393083217 Sylvia Plath did it with the oven door ajar. John Kennedy Toole did it with a garden hose. Hart Crane did it with the famous farewell, “Goodbye, everybody.” The suicides of these thirty-somethings exemplify the tragic tendency of young writers and artists to torture themselves in isolation and self-despair for the sake of their craft. Accordingly, this is what thirty-eight-year-old writer Joshua Yoon was supposed to do as an Asian, an orphan, and an artist. It was the only explanation for someone who “had no reason to do it, and yet he had every reason to do it.” In The Collective, the fourth novel by Korean American author Don Lee, the self-inflicted fate of Joshua Yoon is merely the placeholder for a bildungsroman about three artists who meet in the freshman dorms of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1988. The three friends later live in an artists ’ cooperative in Cambridge, Massachusetts , originally the home of Joshua Yoon’s deceased parents, and finally disperse along the U.S. coasts. The Asian Artists Collective, or 3AC,istheconstantfornarcissisticand may – june 2013 • 65 reviews passionate Moor, beautiful and intricate Jessica Tsai, and literary romantic Eric Cho—the novel’s contemporary Nick Carraway. Their bond strengthens amidst the bigotry of Macalester peers, disloyalty of transient relationships , and a national scandal none of...