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Exiles, a novel by Ron Hansen (FSG): While Ron Hansen’s forays into fiction have been so diverse as to seem disjointed—from the outlaws in Desperados and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, to Hitler and his twisted obsessions in Hitler’s Niece, to the young and unstable nun in Mariette in Ecstasy—all…
Robert Pinsky, Thousands of Broadways, nonfiction. Pinsky builds his portrait of the American small town through an accretion of recurring works, artists and themes, covered in passing and usually in unexpected ways. (Chicago)
A Four-Sided Bed A novel by Elizabeth Searle. Graywolf Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, A Four-Sided Bed, Elizabeth Searle, the 1992 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, ambitiously tackles the shifting boundaries of love and sexuality. Over the course of a telling year, two men and two women…
The Earth in the Attic, poems by Fady Joudah (Yale): Wallace Stevens wrote of the extraordinary pressure of news, how "the consciousness of the world" fixes on events that make "the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement of people in the intervals of a storm. " Fady Joudah’s debut collection explores both storms…
Ladette Randolph, A Sandhills Ballad, a novel: Set in the Nebraska plains, this tale follows the life of a woman who, feeling that all she has believed in has failed her, abandons her emotional and cultural ties. (New Mexico)
Don Leerecommends A Gesture Life, a novel by Chang-rae Lee: “This novel — a magnificent follow-up to Lee’s first book, Native Speaker — has received a fair amount of media attention already, but enough cannot be said about it. Lyrical, powerful, truly remarkable.” (Riverhead)
Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, an anthology on writing edited by Bret Anthony Johnston (Random House): Bret Anthony Johnston has turned over the deck and fanned his cards, face-up, across the table. "I don’t believe in talent," he writes. "Truth be told, I’m not at all sure that writing can be…
Alberto Ríos, The Dangerous Shirt, poems: Ríos sends readers down a magical wormhole through mundane reality, creating a book of poems that fuses both magical realism and cultural physics. (Copper Canyon)
Robert Boswell recommends A Gram of Mars, a first collection by Becky Hagenston: “Becky Hagenston writes with grace, conviction, and wit. The complex stories in this collection circle about the central question in our lives-coming to terms with our past, coming to terms with the present. The stories have the stuff of real life and…
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