James Alan McPherson recommends Blues and Trouble, short stories by Tom Piazzi: “In these stories, Tom Piazzi is touching the grain of actual, as opposed to imaginary, human life. He sees both the pain and the humor, the tragic as well as the comic.” (St. Martin’s)
Dan Wakefield recommends City of a Hundred Fires, poems by Richard Blanco: “A stunning first book of poems by a young Cuban-American writer of awesome lyrical talent. This book tells the story of the Cuban-American experience as powerfully as a novel, and speaks to all who appreciate personal insight, irony, and love of language, both…
Gary Soto recommends Babylon in a Jar, poems by Andrew Hudgins: “Hudgins can’t get over his Southern childhood, which he drags as lovely narrative poems into his adulthood in Cincinnati. Perhaps the South does have manners, as Flannery O’Connor once said, but Hudgins’s characters, mostly men, have such inconsistent manners: one moment they are brutes…
Bone by Bone Stories by Gary Krist. Harcourt Brace, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway. The best stories are often the ones that surprise us, either because we aren’t expecting what happens, or because they take us farther than the destination we had in mind. In his second collection, Bone By Bone, Gary Krist…
There is language and there are languages. Our obsession with translations from languages few of us can read with any cultural comprehension may be leading us away from the traditional connotative values of English into a Peter Pan world of raw and too often merely clever imagery. But for Charles Simic the encounter with a…
Bad Judgment Poems by Cathleen Calbert. Sarabande Books, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Victoria Clausi. Calbert’s second book, Bad Judgment, is a searching, sometimes seething look at the traditions of love and marriage, revealing a strong voice adept in the use of irony. These poems frequently open onto a world poised between the surreal and the…
At twenty-seven, Jake Lamar was a paragon of society — an upstanding young black male. He had been reared in a middle-class family in the Bronx, attended parochial and private schools, gone to Harvard, and was now an associate editor at Time magazine. His memoir is an exegesis of his growing discomfort with his place…
I first read this tremendous book in 1961, when it was published, and recently read it again after an interval of twenty-six years. Both times it has struck me as the best novel I know on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer: and that alone seems marvelous because so…
Bardo Poems by Suzanne Paola. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. In Tibetan, the bardo is defined as a transitory state after death, a murky time where, Suzanne Paola writes in her latest book of poems, “the soul wanders through the heavens and hells . . . trying to achieve…
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