New Books and Recommendations from Former Guest Editors
Robert Boswell recommends The Plan of Chicago by Barry Pearce (Cornerstone Press, November 2025). “Like James Joyce’s Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914), this collection of stories accumulates a strange, cohesive power, and the city itself becomes a character—an arbiter, a friend, an inspiration, a tough customer. The stories are beautifully crafted and carefully written, and while the book is utterly unsentimental, a deep love of place bleeds through the prose. In a culture increasingly bent on the infantilization of its citizens, it’s rare to find a book that’s genuinely written for grown-ups—a dark, honest probing of what it means to be human and to live, right this moment, in the city of Chicago.”
Rosellen Brown recommends Simone in Pieces by Janet Burroway (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). “Janet Burroway, author of the ubiquitous Writing Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1982), has a new novel, Simone in Pieces, whose title describes its strategy. Her character is a World War II orphan who loses her father in an ambiguous way and spends the rest of her life trying to construct a self to accommodate her loss. Simone is a mosaic, and every time the kaleidoscope shakes, we see another aspect of her appealing, infuriating, challenging personality. Both psychologically and philosophically astute, the book moves her all over the map, satirizes (or maybe just presents realistically) her life in academe, introduces dozens of extremely disparate voices, and raises profound questions about the part coincidence plays in our lives.”
David Gullette recommends Mark Halliday’s Living Name (LSU Press, 2025). “Best known by Ploughshares readers as a poet, Mark Halliday is also a skilled commentator on poetry. This book begins with a long essay, ‘Poetry and the Rescue of Particulars,’ which I would recommend as required reading by all poets, whether novice or veteran. His key argument is that a key function of poetry is to present vigorous opposition to ‘oblivion.’ We turn to poetry because we ‘yearn for rescue from the sensation of having been forgotten, tossed aside, wiped out by inexorable time and history.’ Also, excellent essays on Vendler, Koch, Bidart, Pinsky, Hoagland, and others.”
DeWitt Henry recommends Collected Poems 1990–2022 by Paul Hetherington (Pierian Springs Press, 2025). “Paul Hetherington’s poetry has been unavailable in the US despite the poet’s awards and prominence in Australia. This single volume documents his progress from ‘lineated lyric poems’ to ‘prose poems,’ where he proves both master and champion of the form. The effect is of a diary in collage, one remarkable for its ambition and varieties of ‘telling slant,’ while featuring cultural forays to Europe from a colonial frontier, transgressive relationship(s), and a search for communion at once ‘classical,’ original, and impassioned.”
DeWitt Henry recommends Madness by Jack Smith (Pierian Springs Press, 2026). “A philosophy professor as well as novelist, editor, and critic, Smith knows his Nietzsche; and commands the historical and intellectual context of the German 1880s. The main delight, however, is his portrayal of Nietzsche’s madness from syphilis and the impact of his ideas on a former student and disciple, who seems torn between unconventional women, possessive love, and reason. In Smith’s hands, Nietzsche’s madness portends the nightmares of the century to come.”
Alice Hoffman recommends The Author Weekend by Laura Zigman (Blackstone Publishing, May 2026). “Publishing and murder; a mystery for writers and readers.”
Alice Hoffman edited the anthology, The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love, with Scribner in 2026.
Margot Livesey recommends Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp by Lisa Slage Robinson (Black Lawrence Press, 2026). “Who wouldn’t keep reading a story that began ‘Trevor needed a wife?’ Lisa Slage Robinson has a great gift for making readers care about her characters; we want what they want; we dread what they dread. And she is an expert in bad behaviour. Many of her women are not as nice as they seem. Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp is a dazzling and irresistible collection.”
Margot Livesey recommends A Thousand Souls by Catherine Tudish (Acre Books, April 2026). “What a wonderful writer Catherine Tudish is, and what a marvelous novel in stories she has written, so mysterious, so complicated, so beautiful. As one story opens into the next—a girl tames a bear, a boy briefly meets his father, a young woman teaches French, a sheriff loses his job—the web of connections, and our sense of this very particular place in rural Vermont, deepens. A Thousand Souls offers the richest of reading pleasures: the experience of lives lived over time, and the secret sorrows and joys of the community.”
Jay Neugeboren recommends A Stranger Comes to Town by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (EastOver Press, 2025). “A brilliant new novel by the always brilliant Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Set on New York City’s Upper West Side, this is a compelling tale about a man who gets knocked down by a bicycle, and wakes to find he has lost his memory, and his identity. His struggle to discover who he is—and who he was!—takes him on a journey suffused with mystery and memory. That he is a well-known TV actor who solves mysteries complicates the novel in ingenious ways, and makes us question, as he does, how and why our lives are often made up of the stories we tell ourselves.”
Jay Neugeboren is publishing Dickens in Brooklyn: Essays on Family, Writing, & Madness in April 2026 with EastOver Press.
Joyce Peseroff recommends Hunger by Danielle Jones (Bordighera Press, 2025). “The body keeps the score in Danielle Jones’s debut collection, beginning with her Italian immigrant mother’s privation during the Second World War and continuing through the poet’s fraught upbringing in the American south. Jones’s poems engage generations of hunger—for food, for nurture, for a constancy that allows life’s satisfactions—with language as precise and poignant as a woman ‘slicing a potato so thin you can see the sun / of her skin shining through.’ Hunger pierces through lies, secrets, and silences to praise ‘a bite of bright, a dob / of fresh … the jars / and jars of everything left.’”
Gary Soto published Gone Viral in 2026 with Clarion Books. He is publishing Books as Drinking Buddies in April 2026 with Limberlost Press.
David St. John recommends Xeno >> Glossia: An Illuminated Study of Christine de Pizan by Marci Vogel (Parlor Press, 2025). “This inspired braiding of translations, meditations on the act of translation, poetry, and poetic biography is a true wonder. A kind of intimate time travel, Marci Vogel’s book is a sumptuous, beautifully illustrated, and dazzling collection.”
Eleanor Wilner recommends Hitler & My Mother-in-Law, A Memoir by Terese Svoboda (OR Books, 2025). “The title points to this captivating memoir’s seamless interweave of the historic and the intimate, its allergy to solemnity, and its ‘knack for the dreadful,’ as we are given people at scale in the big events of the recent past—like World War II, the fall of Nazism, the spoils of war, the stigma of polio, the McCarthy era—and a woman in the thick of it (a photo of her modeling a turban and purse made from Göring’s military sashes). Written with sharp and penetrating wit, and the engaging, compulsively readable style of a poet and prolific novelist, this is a memoir that becomes a memorable exploration of the elusive, often self-serving nature of truth.”
