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)
Paradise, New York A novel by Eileen Pollack. Temple Univ. Press, $27.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Paradise, New York, Eileen Pollack, author of the acclaimed 1991 story collection The Rabbi in the Attic, deftly evokes the entertaining and complex life of a Catskills hotel, as seen through the eyes of…
In this slender collection of ethnic and political poetry, Martín Espada does what many black poets of the Sixties did with the Broadside Poetry Series during the black arts movement. He writes for an audience not limited to poets and writers, but for the community at large, and Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's…
My Sister Life A memoir by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. The author of the novels Open Water and Family Night, Maria Flook turns to memoir in My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister’s Disappearance, and delivers an original, gripping, intensely moving story. In 1964, Flook’s fourteen-year-old sister Karen…
James Alan McPherson recommends Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine, a memoir by Peter Canning: “Peter Canning is a former student from both Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His book is an excellently written account of the lifesaving roles played by paramedics in an increasingly dangerous world. I might add that Peter is…
Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow Poems by August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $19.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Rivard. August Kleinzahler is a poet whose freshness provokes other poets and critics into describing him as the offspring of unlikely matings. In one book blurb, Thom Gunn brings together Frank O’Hara and Basil Bunting. Helen Vendler,…
Marilyn Hacker recommends Naming the Light: A Week of Years, essays by Rosemary Deen: “These essays mostly begin with the natural world near at hand: the author’s rambling garden in Ulster County, New York. But they range and reach out the way a brilliantly polymath mind does: to Florentine painting, American rural architecture, medieval polyphony,…
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