Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Charles Baxter recommends Question 7, by Richard Flanagan (Knopf, 2023). “A brilliant mix of memoir and both personal and social history, this book manages to say something new about the atom bomb, Leo Szilard, colonialism in Tasmania, and the author’s near-death experience, with all these strands braided together in a formal way that Sebald himself might have admired.”
Laura van den Berg recommends North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, by Ethan Rutherford (A Strange Object, 2025). “This sea-faring debut novel is a stunning evocation of the ocean’s rough-and-tumble mythology.”
Rosellen Brown recommends Master Slave Husband Wife, by Ilyon Woo (37 Ink, 2023). “An astonishing (non-fiction!) saga about the escape to freedom of an enslaved couple in 1848. Ellen Craft, daughter of her white owner, and her husband, William, dared to travel north, pretending that Ellen was a white man so seriously injured that he was swathed in protective bandages that hid him completely; she was assisted by William, who was supposedly her slave. Once safe, the couple became influential in the anti-slavery movement. Their story’s details are riveting; it’s unclear how Woo knows some of them, but they are purported to be accurate.”
Margot Livesey recommends Not All Dead Together, by Lynn Stansbury (Chin Music Press, 2025). “In Not All Dead Together, Stansbury weaves together past and present, gringa and Guatemalan, to dazzling effect. Her novel in stories is a fierce and poignant exploration of friendships over time, of friendships formed in the grip of history. As one character says, ‘The past is always there.’ I couldn’t stop turning these vivid pages, which took me to so many dark corners, so many shining moments.”
Jay Neugeboren recommends all around they’re taking down the lights, by Adam Berlin (Livingston Press, 2024). “Adam Berlin’s first collection of stories, after four masterfully crafted novels, is a winner—a tour de force that evokes the fascinating and often-chilling underside of young and quickly aging New York men and women who are obsessed by neo-Hemingway male tropes and the claims Hollywood has on their souls. Although the characters are wounded, and too often take perverse pleasure in the wounds that pervade their lives, the unique voices that tell the tales compel our attention and describe a world that is as terribly mundane as it is hauntingly real.”
Joyce Peseroff recommends Those Absences Now Closest, by Dzvinia Orlowsky (University of Chicago Press, 2024). “In ‘Two Solitudes,’ a grandmother longs for a son ‘whom she believed / still called for her twenty years on / from a ghost-occupied Siberian labor camp,’ as she holds her living grandchild; this mix of love and grief embodies Orlowsky’s images of war, family, and the thread of Ukrainian history that binds them. Translations, centos, erasures, and ekphrasis from the work of Ukrainian and Romanian artists take on a vivid urgency as poems charting crisis, exile, and the perseverance of memory grapple with our planetary drift. Always surprising, always questing, Orlovsky’s collection resists attempts to efface the past and ignore the future.”
Gary Soto recommends Seamus Heaney’s Gifts, by Henry Hart (LSU Press, 2024). “This is more than a critical biography. It is a commentary about gift giving, particularly the gift of poetry presented from one generation of readers to the next. I can’t think of a higher craft than that of poets who create truth for little financial gain or public notice. We just do it, just write to our own inner audience. After reading Hart’s book, I see our craft as a gift and a gift exchange. This is one of my takeaways, illuminated by a memorable passage in which the poet, age twelve, receives a fountain pen from his parents, a gift upon his leaving for boarding school. Imagine the ink that came from its nib, the tears of the young poet’s departure.”
Rosanna Warren recommends Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, by Mark Lilla (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). “A wise and sprightly book. Thinking alongside Plato’s Socrates (‘Know thyself’), St. Augustine, and Freud, Lilla examines delusion and self-deception, personal and political, and warns against innocence as an ignorance sentimentally and dangerously preserved. He writes wittily: God isn’t ‘a vending machine’; compared to the binding of Isaac, the murder of Abel is ‘a crime statistic.’ He’s light of foot but draws a weighty conclusion, all too apt for our times: ‘Historical nostalgia is a peculiar manifestation of the will to ignorance. It is a failure to accept and mourn the loss of a world that sufferers have never had direct experience with.’”
