Fanny Howe recommends Veil, poems by Rae Armantrout: “A selection of Armantrout’s poems from the past twenty years that were published by small presses. Irony, paranoia, passion, written with precision and glitter. A jewel.” (Wesleyan)
Joyce Peseroff recommends An Ark of Sorts, poems by Celia Gilbert: “A powerful, beautifully written book with a compelling subject. In this delicately shaped series of poems, a mother recalls the passage of a year after the death of a child. An apartment in Paris is first a place of exile, then a place of…
Philip Levine recommends I Thought My Father Was God, true tales edited by Paul Auster: “Paul Auster has chosen one hundred eighty of the thousands of true tales submitted to NPR’s National Story Project and divided them into eight categories (animals, objects, war, love, etc.) and introduced them with sympathy and verve. The power, wit,…
Ann Beattie, The Doctor’s House, a novel: A fascinating, emotionally complex chronicle of a Cambridge copyeditor who is mourning her husband’s accidental death; her brother, who is seeking out women from high school for sex; and their alcoholic mother-all of them trying to unfetter themselves from the tyrannical doctor who was father and husband. (Scribner)
Dangerous Men Stories by Geoffrey Becker. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. For fifteen years, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has been awarded to a first book of stories by an enormously talented writer, and this year’s selection, Dangerous Men by Geoffrey Becker, is no exception. Marked by precise and evocative language…
James Alan McPherson recommends The Huntsman, a novel by Whitney Terrell: “This is an excellent exploration of racial and class interactions in contemporary American life. But much more than this, Whitney provides the reader with a knowing view of Kansas City-a sense of place that is evocative of a settled way of life. This book…
Robert Boswell, Century’s Son, a novel: A Midwestern college professor and her activist-turned-garbage-collector husband are riven and bound by their son’s suicide ten years before, as well as by their daughter, who’s become a teenage mother. Into this exhilarating and penetrating portrait comes the professor’s Russian father, who claims to be a century old. (Knopf)
she didn ‘t mean to do it Poems by Daisy Fried. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. The poems in Daisy Fried’s first collection of poetry, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage…
Gary Soto recommends Rumba Atop the Stones, poems by Orlando Ricardo Menes: “There is lush music to Menes’s first book, and this lushness may arise from his subject, namely the Caribbean islands, particularly Cuba, his parents’ homeland. He writes of its populace-the dock worker, the sugar cane worker, the worker slaving at all trades-and the…
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