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The Hour Between Dog and Wolf Poems by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. It is obvious from the first poem in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s debut book of poetry in English that her concerns will be large: “while my grandfather, a prisoner of war / in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned / booties…
Don Lee recommends Take Three, poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Joe Osterhaus, and Larissa Szporluk: “An innovative and worthy new annual series from Graywolf, edited by Agni’s Askold Melnyczuk. Designed to launch the work of new poets, this first volume presents about twenty-five poems by each of these young writers — three very different, vibrant…
Anne Bernays recommends The Consolations of Philosophy, essays by Alain de Botton: “Makes the abstruse fascinating.” (Pantheon)
The Invisible Circus A novel by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jesse Lee Kercheval. My copy of the Harper’s Book of Quotations insists that Henry Ford really said, “History is more or less bunk,” instead of the shorter, blunter version usually attributed to him. Either way, most Americans would probably agree….
Gail Mazur recommends Open Water, a novel by Maria Flook (Pantheon): “Maria Flook’s people in Open Water are the product of her full-hearted embrace of an American kind of nuttiness and a zest for their strange self-induced troubles. The margin, which is their habitat, is wildly, deliciously drawn by a writer of enormous intelligence and…
Rain A novel by Kirsty Gunn. Grove/Atlantic, $15.00 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. In New Zealander Kirsty Gunn’s first novel, Rain, twelve-year-old Janey and her five-year-old brother, Jim, fight the loss of their innocence as their parents’ world encroaches upon them. They live by an enormous lake, where they play alone, seduced by the solace…
Six Figures A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Knopf, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Stewart O’Nan. Fred G. Leebron’s provocative second novel takes on the frustrations of the young American middle class, born to privilege and fearful they may fail in their expected pursuit of success. By painstakingly dissecting the thwarted aspirations of its main character,…
Andre Dubus recommends Moving Violations, a memoir by John Hockenberry (Hyperion): “You don’t have to be in a wheelchair to love this book, which reaches a conclusion about the U.S. that I’ve never read before.”
Other People’s Troubles Poems by Jason Sommer. Univ. of Chicago Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Although the jacket copy on Jason Sommer’s Other People’s Troubles calls attention to the poems’ focus on the Holocaust, the poems themselves wisely do not. If the jacket shouts Holocaust, the poems breathe it with the same…
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