Chase Twichell recommends Flesh and Blood, a novel by Michael Cunningham: “A contemporary family saga with vivid, memorable characters that tells a heartbreaking story without a trace of sentimentality. The writing is fluent and poetic, unselfconscious, with passages of great beauty.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Russell Banksrecommends Harbor Lights, a novel by Theodore Weesner: “Ted Weesner, over the years since his powerful first novel, The Car Thief, has come numerous times to the rescue of American realism in fiction, and he’s done it again with Harbor Lights, a tough-minded and compassionate portrait of a good man struggling against odds not…
George Garrett recommends Dogfight and Other Stories, a first collection by Michael Knight: “A strikingly original and various young writer.” (Dutton)
Folks Like Me Poems by Sam Cornish. Zoland Books, $12.95 cloth. Reviewed by Sven Birkerts. Sam Cornish has written a book that subtly defies the norms. This is not a gathering of “poems,” or a showcase for isolated tours de force, but rather an ambitious vocal collage in which each poem is a voice and…
Marilyn Hacker recommends Harping On, poems by Carolyn Kizer: “Carolyn Kizer’s magisterial new book is a world citizen’s witty and lyrical meditations on many of the major events of this century, from the intimate perspective of someone who was there. As she re/members herself in sentences and stanzas-the seventeen-year-old observing Einstein; the twenty-year-old hearing of…
Domestic Work Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Kevin Young. In a voice confident, diverse, and directed, Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work does what a first book should, and more, all while avoiding what first books often do — either borrowing themes from other poets or recycling a narrow vision of family…
Maxine Kumin recommends Forged Correspondences, poems by Philip Brady: “Wildly inventive, these ‘forgeries’ roam from Heraclitus to the Queen of Sheba, from Newark to Africa. Highly serious and richly comic, a great trip.” (New Myths)
This first novel is neither polished and gemlike nor gusty and pungent, nor funny, nor exceptionally brilliant, nor prophetic in its earnestly Mailerian effort to place third world pain, protest, and pioneering into philosophical, historical and literary perspective, but the book has other solid virtues, worth the reader's patience to absorb. The time is the…
Don’t Erase Me Stories by Carolyn Ferrell. Houghton Mifflin, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Elizabeth Searle. “You ain’t no Body,” a young girl is told in Carolyn Ferrell’s powerfully compassionate first collection, Don’t Erase Me. With a rich variety of voices, Ferrell lets her characters — most of them African-American girls and women — answer back…
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