In this genre-defying book, whose presiding spirit is filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, the autobiographical impulse is combined with a quest to blaze detours around conventional fiction and memoirs.

In addition to his influential art criticism, Rubinstein has recently published literary work in the American Poetry Review, Grand Street and The Oulipo Compendium. In 1996, Hard Press brought out Rubinstein's collection of poems The Basement of the Cafe Rilke, which Harry Mathews called "lucid, compelling and endowed with astonishing authority."

Review of Postcards From Alphaville by Max Henry, ArtNet

"Postcards from Alphaville is author/poet/art critic Raphael Rubinstein's second book from Hard Press. A follow-up to his first book of poems, The Basement of the Café Rilke, this 165-page prose work falls somewhere between a Francis Ponge novella and travelogue prose. Rubinstein ruminates on the people and places he's encountered on his many travels throughout Europe and America.

"Told with a dualistic voice and concise detachment, many of his characters are local eccentrics revisited through a menagerie of far-away memories and real-life cinematic vignettes. Rubinstein's story, "Jacques de Mercier, Where Are You?", brings closure to a supposed reencounter with a would-be leftist filmmaker met two decades before. "A Godard Scrapbook" begins in 1975, weaving in a parallel chronology of his life with the film history of his idol Jean-Luc Godard. Godard shot the film Numero Deux on video (note that the title of Rubinstein's book refers to the 1965 Godard film Alphaville) in '75 and as the story digresses one realizes Rubinstein has seen every one of his films from the '60s on. The story moves back and forth from personal anecdotes to anecdotes about protagonists in Godard films. "A Lost Profile" muses on a late '70s photograph from the music pages of the Sept. 1, 1996, New York Times. It's a concert at Max's Kansas City by the legendary James Chance and the Contortions. The photo shows the audience watching as the No Wave singer performs his antics – the author recognizes himself as an audience member and begins examining this period of his life, its history and relationship to the present as if musing on a reveler in a vintage Brassai nightlife photo.

"Along with Surrealism and contemporary art, there's an affinity with European Cinema's pace and storytelling and the ironies of incidental encounters with people from the past that no longer fit into the present. All the while the back stories keep a crafty laissez-fare intimacy, as if told over a four hour dinner party, the private asides and digressions expanding and contracting in a skillfully measured monologue."