Review

Ladies of the Borobudur by Barbara Haines Howett

DeWitt Henry recommends Ladies of the Borobudur, stories by Barbara Haines Howett: “Although Howett’s stories portray a variety of characters, the primary focus is on corporate wives in Indonesia and their troubled awareness of social injustice and of the richness of cultural differences. Howett explores and evokes astonishingly different points of view, and her post-colonial…

Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm by David Hamilton

DeWitt Henry recommends Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, by David Hamilton: “In an experimental ‘memoir’ that extends from the personal to the regional to the historic and geographical with an epic sweep comparable to Thoreau’s in Walden and William Carlos Williams’s in Paterson, New Jersey, Hamilton considers the legacies of injustice in…

When Men Were the Only Models We Had by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Maxine Kumin recommends When Men Were the Only Models We Had, a memoir by Carolyn G. Heilbrun: “A study of the influences of Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun on Heilbrun’s own literary development, but the book is far broader than that-really, a history of Columbia University in the turmoil of the sixties and…

Veil by Rae Armantrout

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)

An Ark of Sorts by Celia Gilbert

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…

I Thought My Father Was God edited by Paul Auster

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,…

The Doctor’s House by Ann Beattie

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)

rev. of Dangerous Men by Geoffrey Becker

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…

The Huntsman by Whitney Terrell

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…