Philip Levine recommends Poets of the Non-Existent City, an anthology edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak: "First and foremost this is an homage to an era and a place, Los Angeles, and to the dedicated few who worked to create a free society during the shameful decade of McCarthy. At the center was a group of…
Maxine Kumin recommends The House on Eccles Road, a first novel by Judith Kitchen: “A day in the lives of Molly and Leo Bluhm in Dublin, Ohio, June 16, 1999, mirroring Joyce’s Bloomsday, artfully layered with outer calm and inner disarray.” (Penguin)
Chase Twichell, The Lover of God, translations of poems by Rabindranath Tagore: The result of a five-year collaboration between Twichell and a Bengali scholar, Tony Stewart, this fascinating book offers twenty-two poems about a love affair between a young girl and the god Krishna. (Copper Canyon)
Thomas Lux recommends Old Bright Wheel, poems by Robert Fanning: “A first volume by a young poet of great emotional depth, skill, and imaginative energy.” (Ledge)
The Winter Without Milk, stories by Jane Avrich (Mariner):What can be said about a writer who reimagines everyone from Oedipus to Hester Prynne, and throws in common contemporary folk for good measure? Here are stories that are literary in the best sense of the word-smart, witty, erudite, even at times bookish. This first collection hums…
The Room Where I Was Born, poems by Brian Teare (Wisconsin): In his first book, Teare exceeds his ambition to build a wholly new system of myths, and creates an utterly complex and harrowing volume as structurally and figuratively brilliant as it is genius in its lyrical flexibility. The many subjects of this book devour…
The Owl Question, poems by Faith Shearin (Utah State):The speaker of these poems, always quick-witted and warm, considers her place among the commonplace. While all of the poems in this debut collection deal with subjects close to home—family, childhood, motherhood—they shiver with a nervous tension as the speaker returns again to the fact that she…
Serious Girls, a novel by Maxine Swann (Doubleday): Maxine Swann—after claiming a Best American, an O. Henry, and a Pushcart for a single story that appeared in Ploughshares—follows two girls struggling to transcend the limitations of their childhood in her riveting debut novel. This is a wise and wonderful piece of storytelling that teaches us…
Lucky Girls, stories by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco): It seems impossible that a writer of Freudenberger’s youth could know so much about the world, but she does. The five long stories in this first book—mostly about young American women who are living as expatriates in Bangkok, Delhi, Bombay—crackle with acuity and authenticity. The narration doesn’t miss…
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