Come Up and See Me Sometime Short stories by Erika Krouse. Scribner, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Debra Spark. Mae West provides the title for Erika Krouse’s debut book, Come Up and See Me Sometime, and also the epigraphs for the collection’s thirteen stories. But the bawdy self-confidence of Mae West (“I’m single because I was…
Wavemaker II A novel by Mary-Beth Hughes. Grove/Atlantic Monthly, $24.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her admirable debut novel, Wavemaker II, Mary-Beth Hughes stitches together a complex story of an unraveling family against the backdrop of the early 1960’s misdoings of Roy Cohn, the controversial McCarthy-era lawyer. While the storyline is full of daring…
Robert Boswell recommends Leaving Disneyland, a novel by Alexander Parsons: ” Leaving Disneyland is a powerful and wide-ranging story of betrayal, violence, and regret. The book is brutally honest, unsparing, and written with amazing authority. The piercing sadness of Doc Kane is so beautifully rendered that the reader comes to see it as something more-a…
Waterborne Poems by Linda Gregerson. Houghton Mifflin, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. “Eyes Like Leeks,” the first poem in Linda Gregerson’s new collection, Waterborne, distills in a parenthesis the problematic that pervades the poems: “(how / odd / to be this and no other and, like all / / the others, marked for…
Hubbard is an assured storyteller and a complex narrative stylist. Her collection of stories is unified in theme — pent-up characters desiring changes that may prove creative or destructive, but which offer release and relief, and which vivify what has been known as "life." The title story provides a key image: "Without thinking she ran…
M. L. Rosenthal recommends Winter Channels, poems by James Schevill (Floating Island): “A rare collection of brief lyric pieces, full of gentle feeling, humane wisdom, and sharp political and social thrusts, by one of America’s most serious-and seriously neglected-poets.”
Yusef Komunyakaa, Taboo, poems: In the first book of a trilogy, Komunyakaa shows that he is our great poet of connectivity—the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. (FSG)
Don Lee recommends Watermark, poetry and prose edited by Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi: “A fascinating and surprising collection by a new generation of Vietnamese American writers, delving into identity and displacement with energy and grace.” (Temple)
Winter Range A novel by Claire Davis. Picador, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In Winter Range, Idaho writer Claire Davis offers a debut novel that effectively evokes small-town life on the Montana range and culminates in a breathtaking series of artfully constructed calamities. Predominantly from the third-person intimate points of view of the three…
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