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…
A given of Elizabethan thought — expressed in works as different as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra — was God's goodness as made manifest through the "infinite variety," to use Enobarbus's phrase, of his creation. Susan Mitchell's Rapture, her second collection, is an extended hymn in praise of our world's…
Sky Open Again Poems by Gian Lombardo. Dolphin-Moon, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Priscilla Sneff. The prose poem, constructed of sentences rather than lines, is a more liquid sort of solid than other poems. More like glass — that is, molten, mobile, globby — than crystal, the prose poem makes do without enjambment, relying instead on…
My Body to You Stories by Elizabeth Searle. Univ. of Iowa Press, $22.95. 1992 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winner, selected by James Salter. Reviewed by James Carroll. Elizabeth Searle has written these stories in fire. They are thirteen searing portraits of women or girls whose lives have taken them to the extreme of feeling —…
Out West A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is nothing timid about Fred G. Leebron’s first novel, Out West. He takes two basically decent, highly educated, young social do-gooders and quickly steeps them into the squalid heart of two murders, and then asks us, his readers, to…
Ann Beattie recommends Reader’s Block, a novel by David Markson: “Finally: a fictional sequel to Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’ Markson’s novel advances by allusion and cumulative effect, like a big snowball going downhill (and it’s impossible to read without realizing that the twentieth century has gone the same way). This is really a work of genius:…
Maura Stanton recommends My Shining Archipelago, poems by Taluikki Ansel: “Ansel’s poems are surprising and imaginative, filled with fresh insight into the natural world. Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.” (Yale)
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