Review

rev. of Typical American by Gish Jen

There's comedy in Gish Jen's Typical American, comedy tempered in wry and refreshing ways. It's the story of a big-eared, bumbling Chinese boy who makes his way in America almost in spite of himself: unassimilated and adrift in an indifferent Manhattan, he is rescued by a long-lost sister, gets a Ph.D. in engineering, and then…

rev. of The Only World by Lynda Hull

The Only World Poems by Lynda Hull. HarperCollins, $22.00 cloth, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. The term mimesis, unfortunately having come to be redolent of tweeds and pipe smoke, seems wildly inapplicable to a poet as inspired by the exhaust-fumed ether of today’s cities and the musky glamour of their earlier incarnations as…

rev. of The Truly Needy and Other Stories by Lucy Honig

The Truly Needy and Other Stories Stories by Lucy Honig. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Pedro Ponce. The title of Lucy Honig’s debut collection, winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, echoes the familiar plea of fundraisers and activists to forget selfish personal concerns and remember the less fortunate. But for…

Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy by Frances Mayes

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…

rev. of The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America ed. by Garrett Hongo

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…

The Trust by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones

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….

rev. of Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver

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…

rev. of The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo

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…

rev. of The Paper Anniversary by Joan Wickersham

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,…