"Novel" seems somehow the wrong term to apply to Francine Prose's first book; and "first novel" seems even more unfortunate, connoting as it so often does, grandness of purpose and lack of artistic control. Rather, Judah The Pious is a tale, a story within a story, almost a legend. The writer's art lies in the…
Don Lee recommends Living to Be 100, stories by Robert Boswell (HarperPerennial): “A richly imaginative, truly wonderful collection of short stories. Where other writers would stop, Boswell always goes one unexpected, delightful step further.”
Maura Stanton recommends Improvising Rivers, poems by David Jauss (Cleveland State): ” Improvising Rivers is an impressive book of technically accomplished poems. The surface details, as on a river, float gracefully over hidden but powerful currents.”
Kick in the Head Stories by Steven Rinehart. Doubleday, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Steven Rinehart’s debut collection of stories, Kick in the Head, presents an ensemble of characters pushed through the edge to an abominable and shocking other side, while at the same time giving us tales that are always magnetic, entertaining, and…
It's no lie that the American novel is in deep trouble. Especially the "serious" novel, which is to say the story that by all the available ways and means of craft aims to offer a sensuous affective experience, the first condition of a work of art. It's true that, compared to non-fiction, to all kinds…
Those who follow the work of Robert B. Shaw are a patient lot, who wait with smoldering enthusiasm for something doled out like Maundy money, or water in the desert. Their patience is rewarded by poems of curiously persistent substance, so dense and well worked that they glow like the better sort of antique furniture;…
"The visible points to the invisible," writes Sarah Appleton in Ladder of the World's Joy. This is the basic statement, the ars poetica, of a writer for whom every thing means more than itself. In an explanatory note at the end, Sarah Appleton recounts her indebtedness to Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, which…
Although best known for its pastoral sympathies, Maxine Kumin's work has always possessed a moral edge, and in her latest book, Looking for Luck, she confronts the precarious nature of privilege, awarded to some, withheld from others, human and beast alike. In "Looking for Luck in Bangkok," the poet stoops under an elephant smelling of…
Gary Soto recommends In a Few Words/En pocas palabras, poems and translations by José Antonio Burciaga: “Burciaga has gathered dichos-pithy sayings and proverbs-that reveal the folk wisdom of rural peasants. These are deft translations, as wise as the originals, as in ‘Si cada pendejo trajera palo, faltaría leña’: ‘If every fool carried a stick, firewood…
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