DeWitt Henry recommends A Tragic Honesty, a biography by Blake Bailey: “Richard Yates comes fully alive as an artist and as a man in this meticulously researched, judicious, and critically perceptive biography. Blake Bailey has done for Yates what Carlos Baker did for Hemingway, allowing Yates himself to speak from letters, archives, reported conversations, and…
Gerald Stern, American Sonnets, poems: In a collection of fifty-nine “sonnets” of twenty or so lines each, most consisting of a single sentence about a single moment, Stern intimately gives tribute to everything from clocks to gangster cousins. (Norton)
Sails the Wind Left Behind, poems by Alessandra Lynch (Alice James): These poems do the remarkable job of making contemporary American poetry feel new again. Lynch takes risks at every turn, trying out new shapes in the mouth, flirting with narrative. A story of longing and desire gets told, but entirely on Lynch’s terms —…
C. D. Wright recommends Alphabet, poetry by Inger Christensen: “A brilliant abecedary by Danish writer Inger Christensen which sets forth our feckless pressure on the earth’s futurity in a comely ancient form.” (New Directions)
James Alan McPherson recommends The Wide-Brimmed Hat, a collection by Susan Kuehn Boyd: “This beautiful collection of stories, memories, and poems captures the sensibility of a very special writer. Ms. Boyd’s stories began appearing in The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories as early as 1947. Set in regions as far apart…
The Guru of Love, a novel by Samrat Upadhyay (Houghton Mifflin): The debut novel of short-story writer Samrat Upadhyay is set in Kathmandu, but for most of the first half of The Guru of Love, the plot and the language aren’t so terribly exotic. This remarkable restraint is one of this wonderful novel’s many strengths,…
C. D. Wright recommends Alphabet, poems by Inger Christensen: “A book to break up the psychic mumbo jumbo within, and to help you fight the actual threats from without. A true singer of the syllables.” (New Directions)
Margot Livesey recommends Secret Frequencies: A New York Education, a memoir by John Skoyles: "No one who reads this delightful, absorbing account of a teenage boy’s summer of initiation will ever forget the brilliant characters or the remarkable city—New York in the sixties—which John Skoyles brings so eloquently to life." (Nebraska)
Carolyn Forché, Blue Hour, poems: Forché’s lyrical fourth collection, her first since the tour de force The Angel of History, ranges from personal memories of childhood and childrearing to stark images of atrocity, with the centerpiece, the forty-seven-page “On Earth,” brilliantly modeled after “gnostic abecedarians.” (HarperCollins)
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