Robert Boswell recommends Silk, stories by Grace Dane Mazur: “Mazur is a former microbiologist, and the stories in her first collection offer a means of apprehending the world that is both intellectually fascinating and sensually wired. It is either a book of the mind about pleasures of the flesh, or a book of the flesh…
George Garrett recommends Omniphobia, fiction by R. H. W. Dillard (Louisiana State): “Four stories and three novellas by a master of American metafiction. A virtuoso demonstration of the virtues of the avant-garde.”
DeWitt Henry recommends Rabbit Fever, stories by Geoffrey Clark: “Geoffrey Clark’s new collection, Rabbit Fever, is rich with terrible beauties. His mature prose is fresh with sensory texture, sonority, wit, hard-learned truths, and precisely dramatized voice. The progress through the collection as well as the upper Michigan setting is reminiscent of Hemingway’s Men Without Women,…
Sister to Sister: Women Write About the Unbreakable Bond. An anthology edited by Patricia Foster. Anchor Books/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. For the anthology Sister to Sister, Patricia Foster has gathered twenty compelling pieces on an essential subject: the relationships of sisters. Foster writes in her introduction that she opened her eyes one…
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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