New Books and Recommendations from Former Guest Editors
Cornelius Eady recommends Simply, Patiently, Quietly, by Charlie Rauh (String Letter Publishing, 2025). “Charlie Rauh is a guitarist who uses the lines of poets (Dickinson, Wheatley) as a jumping-off point for making beautifully impressive instrumental pieces, and this book—which explains how he got there, along with links to the tracks—feels in the spirit of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a book that’s not poetry, but feeds what helps bring it into the world.”
DeWitt Henry recommends On the Invisible Palm of God, by Joseph Hurka (Vine Leaves Press, 2025). “This eloquent memoir of apprenticeship, friendship, and tribute to fiction writer Andre Dubus (père) reminds me of Gorky’s classic account of Tolstoy or more recently, Tom Grimes’s of Frank Conroy. Torches of craft and spirit are shared, and then passed on. First taught by Dubus, then by James Alan McPherson, Hurka becomes a teacher and notable writer himself, passing on lessons on voice, on empathy and listening, on inventing selves and actions better than your own, and on seeking to state the problems of self or society correctly, rather than trying to solve them. When he reports his discovery to Dubus—‘You write about an individual, but you’re representing all of humanity in your character’—Dubus responds, ‘That’s it.’”
DeWitt Henry recommends Listening and Speaking: New and Selected Stories, by Ellen Wilbur (Pierian Springs Press, 2025). “Her first collection since the widely praised Wind and Birds and Human Voices (Plume, 1984), showcases nineteen stories ranging from short-short to novella length. With visionary daring, Wilbur leads us into unexpected corners then transcends them profoundly and beyond expectation.”
DeWitt Henry published Do I Dream Or Wake? with Pierian Springs Press in 2024 and Top Cop Kills in 2025 with Pierian Springs Press.
Edward Hirsch published My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy in 2025 with Knopf.
Antonya Nelson recommends Waiting for Something Else by Martin Cloutier (Heliotrope Books, 2025). “This is a marvelous contemporary novel of manners. Delightful and insightful.”
Jay Neugeboren recommends The Meaning of the Murder, by Walter Levis (Anaphora Literary Press, 2025). “An exquisitely crafted, utterly enthralling novel about a female New York City cop in search of her father following his disappearance—a novel that makes us understand all too well the ways in which our private lives are now inextricably linked to lethal global forces.”
Ladette Randolph recommends Orbital, by Samantha Harvey (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023). “I loved the formal constraints of this short novel, and while the astronauts’ daily lives are depicted in realistic ways, the structure allows for fabulous descriptions and speculations about the odds of other intelligent life (that we can recognize) in the little part of the vast universe that we know. And its loving, lovely descriptions of our perfect, miraculous earth as it appears from space are timely reminders of all we take for granted.”
Ladette Randolph recommends Rabbit Moon, by Jennifer Haigh (Little, Brown and Company, 2025). “This book by a former Ploughshares guest editor was a wonderful surprise. Set, mostly, in contemporary Shanghai, the city becomes as much a character as the Litvak family, through which this hard-to-put-down story is told.”
Peggy Shumaker recommends The Museum of Unnatural Histories, by Annie Wenstrup (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). “This book is written by a Dena’ina poet from Fairbanks, AK. In the museum she imagines, her poems curate connections and encounters, archiving cultural and personal stories of dissonance and allowing profound perceptions. Annie is a recent winner of a Whiting Award.”
Peggy Shumaker recommends Something About Living, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (University of Akron Press, 2024). “Tuffaha shows in these poems how love in the face of genocide is a radical, life-giving act. This book won the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.”
Richard Tillinghast published Night Train to Memphis in 2025 with White Pine Press.
Laura van den Berg recommends Are You Happy?: Stories, by Lori Ostlund (Astra House, 2025). “There is not one false line in this collection of brutally hilarious heartbreakers.”
