Unravelling A novel by Elizabeth Graver. Hyperion, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Caroline Langston. In Elizabeth Graver’s quietly enchanting first novel, Unravelling, the longings of the young narrator, Aimee Slater, are strikingly vivid and contemporary, yet the story is set in nineteenth-century New England, at the juncture between the region’s rural, puritanical past and all the…
Several nights after the day his book reached the counters of three of Missoula's bookstores (the fourth sells prose pornography), Richard Hugo was offering the following terse explanation of the significance of the title, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, to a group of local admirers: "Sir Walter Scott wrote a poem called "The Lady…
The Paper Anniversary A novel by Joan Wickersham. Viking, $21.00 cloth. Reviewed by Katherine Min. In her first novel, The Paper Anniversary, Joan Wickersham writes beautifully and with excruciating honesty about marriage, the sublime and the mundane of conjugal affection, and conjugal brutality. One of the astonishments of the book is the way both partners,…
Charles Simic recommends The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson (Field Poetry Series): “If you wish to know what the prose poem can do, read Edson. He is one of the most original poets we have, widely translated and almost unknown at home.”
Maxine Kumin recommends Vietnamerica, a memoir by Thomas A. Bass: “A disturbing and totally compelling account of the lives of Amerasian children left behind in Vietnam; transported to the U.S., dumped in detention centers; used in factory jobs; fated to wander rootless from place to place. Bass, like John Balaban before him, forces us to…
Fanny Howe recommends The Letters of Mina Harker, a novel by Dodie Bellamy: “A contemporary epistolary novel that carries the ecstatic and personal extravagance of New York School poetry into a new realm. San Francisco but also novelistic observation. Sexually explicit but far from pornographic. See the difference.” (Hard Press)
The Pleasing Hour A novel by Lily King. Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway. This may be the first time you hear of Lily King, but her debut novel, The Pleasing Hour, assures that it won’t be the last. With an acute sensibility tuned to the finest details of character, place, and…
The Very Air A novel by Douglas Bauer. William Morrow, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Alexandra Marshall. In The Very Air, Douglas Bauer’s second novel, “Doctor” Luther Mathias builds an empire with his pirate radio station, which broadcasts illegally over the border into the U.S. in the early part of this century. As events conspire to…
For the thirteen years since Frank Stanford's suicide at twenty-nine, most of his nine books, which were all from small presses, have been difficult if not impossible to find. Leon Stokesbury has done an impressive job winnowing the more than one thousand pages of Stanford's published poetry to one hundred and ten, including six previously…
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