Madeline DeFrees recommends Saying the Necessary, poems by Edward Harkness: “The balance between reality and imagination is so precarious and the language so persuasive that the reader identifies with the speaker.” (Pleasure Boat Studio)
Lloyd Schwartz recommends Offspring, a novel by Jonathan Strong (Zoland): “Reading a novel by Jonathan Strong is like finding a secret treasure in a dark attic. ‘Every unhappy family,’ Tolstoy wrote, ‘is unhappy in its own way.’ Offspring is the tale of a peculiarly happy family that lives in an unhappy world which can’t understand-or…
Dan Wakefield recommends Playing the Game, a novel by Alan Lelchuk (Baskerville): “This novel has been neglected and deserves to be read. A wonderful and entertaining insight into U.S. sports, with a coach who uses Thoreau, Whitman, and Francis Parkman as inspirational reading for halftime pep talks.”
There are some dazzling innovators in fiction these days. The 1970s have been electrically charged with Barth's succession of fun houses, barthelme's mosaics, Marquez's dream epics, Borges' magic boxes, Gaddis' unending tape recorder, and Calvino's invisible voyages. Midst these splendors, is there room for an author who plays no tricks whatever? Andre Dubus' Separate Flights…
Maxine Kumin recommends Old Mother, Little Cat: A Writer’s Reflections on Her Kitten, Her Aged Mother, and . . . Life, a memoir by Merrill Joan Gerber: “This is a deeply affecting book, told absolutely without artifice; unflinching but compassionate, and very charming. Gerber is best known as a novelist and short story writer. She…
Readers familiar with the verbal dazzle of Alice Fulton's previous collections might assume that the title of her third is a sly allusion to sexual politics. But Fulton is engaged by all sorts of meetings and collisions, from the nuclear family to the electron, as well as by the individual's confrontation with God. Fulton's equanimity…
Shark Dialogues A novel by Kiana Davenport. Atheneum, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Katherine Min. Hawaiian-born writer Kiana Davenport’s new novel, Shark Dialogues, resembles a myriad of dreams, each of them urgent and vivid, some dark with destruction and heartbreak, others bright with triumph, all shimmering with sensual beauty. Davenport manages to create a world that…
Among the many pleasures of Old and New Poems is the process of soul-making revealed within its pages. Donald Hall's gifts for seemingly effortless, exact language and formal grace were present from the start, as were his intimations of mortality, both for individuals and for New England's rural life, practiced by generations, supplanted by suburbia….
In her latest book of poems, Lucille Clifton writes about the lives of women as poets, historical witnesses, opinionated friends, mothers, wives. With all of them, there is a painful honesty that makes Clifton's work worthwhile, even if not for every taste. Often, the poems are personal, barren utterances of feminist rage, represented in a…
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