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…
The Saint of Burning Down, poems by Nicole Cuddeback (Zoo): With a penchant for the things of this world that reminds one of Bishop, Cuddeback’s first book catalogues landscapes diverse as the fecund silt of her childhood Florida to sunlit, crowd-filled piazzas of Florence, Italy. The book opens with the speaker as a muted and…
Madeline DeFrees recommends The Volunteer, poems by Candace Black: "The poems in this first book by Candace Black are, like the volunteer of the title, pure gift. They spring, as if spontaneously, from the common clay of everyday experience—love, marriage, family, birth and death. In fresh, precise, evocative language, these poems prove the examined life…
Rosellen Brown recommends There Is Room for You, a novel by Charlotte Bacon: “A two-generation novel in which a British mother’s childhood in India is not only fascinating for the reader but illuminating for her very American daughter.” (FSG)
Al Young recommends The Devil’s Garden, poems by Adrian Matejka: "Adrian Matejka’s first collection simply sizzles." (Alice James)
George Garrett recommends The Stories of Richard Bausch, a collection by Richard Bausch: “The sixth collection (and fourteenth book) by one of the finest living masters of the short story. Forty-one stories, old and new, to relish and rejoice in, to learn from.” (HarperCollins)
Charles Baxter, Saul and Patsy, a novel: Baxter’s luminous new novel reprises Saul and Patsy Bernstein, two of his short stories’ most beloved characters, as they try to establish their lives in Five Oaks, Michigan. (Pantheon)
DeWitt Henry recommends Man vs. Nature, a novel by Doug Crandell: “In his debut novel, Crandell tells a lyrical, preposterous tale of Midwestern farm life, interweaving the coming of age of a farm boy with a lunatic father who raises pigs and a subplot about the invasion of TV news and the media’s distortions of…
James Carroll, Secret Father, a novel: Returning to fiction, Carroll presents the spellbinding story of a man and a woman in Berlin in 1961, trying to free their children from the East German Stasi. (Houghton Mifflin)
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