The Pugilist at Rest Stories by Thom Jones. Little, Brown and Company, $18.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kevin Miller. Already commercially successful, with half the entries previously in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Esquire, Thom Jones’s debut collection is best described as utterly uncompromising. From his gallery of hard-assed, hard-headed, hard-luck, or simply hard cases, to…
Even the gods crave the pungence of language we have "monstered up" for them in The Want Bone. In poems like "Lament for the Makers," "Hut," and "At Pleasure Bay," Robert Pinsky names the ways we are made — and unmade — by wanting, and how what we want is essentially shaped by naming. But…
George Garrettrecommends Someone to Watch Over Me, stories by Richard Bausch: “Twelve new stories by one of the most gifted short fiction writers alive and writing.” (HarperCollins)
Maxine Kumin recommends The Black Notebooks, a memoir by Toi Derricotte: “Searing. Read it.” (Norton)
Justin Kaplan recommends The Edge of Marriage, debut stories by Hester Kaplan: “Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and praised by The New York Times Book Review for the work’s ‘graceful, accomplished prose’ and by The Boston Globe for the portrayal of ‘articulate adults, fully aware at every moment of the agony they are…
Thomas Lux recommends Spare Change, poems by Kevin Pilkington: “Tough, quirky, lucid poems by a poet unafraid of being understood.” (La Jolla Poets)
The Blue Hour A novel by Elizabeth Evans. Algonquin Books, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Janet Desaulniers. In Elizabeth Evans’s first novel, The Blue Hour, the narrator, Penny, recounts her teenaged years with both a child’s twitchy, anticipatory dread of the future and an adult’s sorrowful knowledge of the past. The book peels away the decorous…
The End of the Alphabet Poems by Claudia Rankine. Grove, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Michael J. Carter. In Claudia Rankine’s new collection, The End of the Alphabet, the always tenuous relationship between language and felt experience is stretched nearly to its limit: “The moment / of elucidation snipped its tongue.” Anguishing and fragmented, the voice…
Thomas Lux recommends Squandering, poems by George Mills: “Gorgeous, utterly original poems by a poet now in his mid-seventies. Exceptionally beautiful production-a limited letterpress edition. His first book was The House Sails Out of Sight of Home, winner of the 1991 Morse Poetry Prize, from Northeastern University Press.” (Indian Hill)
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