Last Things A novel by Jenny Offill. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Jenny Offill’s stunning debut novel, Last Things, captures the crucial years in the life of a young narrator trying to choose between a conventional but remote father and a mesmerizing but insane mother. In the mid-1980’s, Grace Davitt…
Linda Svendsen's lovely first book, Marine Life, reads like a muted version of the work of fellow Canadian writers Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Isabel Huggan. Her stories, like theirs, are funny, beautifully written, emotionally precise tales about the lives of girls and women, although in Marine Life the girls and women are all the…
Dan Wakefield recommends In the Family Way, a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: ” In the Family Way is a witty, loving, totally credible novel of the way a typically atypical family lives now. Another fine novel by the author of that small masterpiece, Leaving Brooklyn.” (Morrow)
Late Empire Poems by David Wojahn. Pittsburgh Poetry Series, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. “History has to live with what was here,” wrote Lowell in one of his offhand but authoritative pronouncements. In an age emerging from the New Critical hegemonic concept of literary and historical tradition that Lowell was schooled on,…
Jane Shore recommends Meadowlands, poems by Louise Glück: “A brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking book, both personal and universal, by the master craftsperson and muse of her generation.” (Ecco)
In the Surgical Theatre Poems by Dana Levin. The American Poetry Review, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. Dana Levin’s first book of poetry, In the Surgical Theatre, resonates with the dual imagery of pain and healing, scalpel and angel. The poems move swiftly and seamlessly from the literal drama of the operating room —…
Maxine Kumin recommends Late Summer Break, fiction by Ann B. Knox (Papier-Mache): “A delightful series of interwoven short stories, mostly with female protagonists, set on the fringes of rural life, in which the author explores interaction between the generations in ways that touch all of us.”
It is easy in one way to review Thomas Lux's Memory's Handgrenade because the book is such a pleasure to read and re-read. It is also easy to be misled: one keeps hearing other voices in his work. There is W.S. Merwin, with whom Lux shares a concern for subjects like gloves (Merwin: "gloves of…
Frank Bidart has business with substancelessness, whether in the wasting figure of Ellen West or in dreams which suffuse the old and new poems of In the Western Night. The book's unusual structure — Bidart begins with poems dated "1990," works retrospectively through books published 1983-1976, and ends with his most recent poems — suggests…
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