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)
Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians, stories: In this powerful, exuberant new collection, Alexie presents stories about Native Americans who find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads that test their notions of who they are and who they love. (Grove)
The King of Limbo Stories by Adrianne Harun. Mariner, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Don Lee. The ten stories in Harun’s first collection, The King of Limbo, tend toward the elliptical — tinged with mystery and occasionally fable, populated by loners who are estranged from loved ones. Haunted, grieving, the characters fitfully reach for solace, sometimes…
George Garrett, Southern Excursions, essays: This volume collects more than fifty of Garrett’s essays, reviews, and introductions-all concerning Southern letters in our time, delivered with his characteristic wit and charm. (LSU)
Donald Hall, Willow Temple, stories: There are twelve stories here—five from The Ideal Bakery and six collected for the first time, as well as one new tale—and the volume attests to Hall’s mastery as a storyteller, the prose lyrical and elegiac as he movingly unfolds each character’s frailties. (Houghton Mifflin)
Winter 2017-18 - Digital