Rosellen Brown recommends Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy, a memoir by Frances Mayes: “Frances Mayes’s beautifully written account of her love affair with a house she and her husband renovated in Tuscany, and with a place that retains ancient standards for all things sensual, contains an essay that appeared in my personal…
The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America An anthology edited by Garrett Hongo. Anchor Books, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Stewart David Ikeda. In this time of multicultural vogue, Garrett Hongo’s extraordinary poetry anthology, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, makes an intelligent statement about the limitations of limits, the perils of essentialism, and…
Philip Levine recommends The Trust, nonfiction by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones: “A complex and fascinating story of the Ochs-Sulzberger families, owners of The New York Times, beginning with the amazing Adolph Ochs, an American success story to rival Gatsby’s, and ending yesterday with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., in command of the dynasty….
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)
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