The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters, a novel: Hoffman’s latest book tells of sisters who create their own magical world to escape a tragic encounter that has forever changed their lives. (Areheart)
Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters, a novel: Hoffman’s latest book tells of sisters who create their own magical world to escape a tragic encounter that has forever changed their lives. (Areheart)
In his essay “Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness,” Tony Hoagland makes sense of current divisions among poets writing in the U.S. today by dividing them into camps that go to poetry either for some sort of perspective on experience—to feel a cathartic “gong of recognition”—or to untangle their sleepy mammal selves from the probable, humdrum,…
Rosanna Warren, Fables of the Self, essays: Emerging from the tradition of British and American poet-critics, Warren traces the idea of imagined selfhood through time and space, creating an occult autobiography that shows the imagination as a transfiguring and potentially moral force. (Norton)
Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, essays: A richly contemplative collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America’s most original contemporary poets. (Graywolf)
Pilgrims Stories by Elizabeth Gilbert. Houghton Mifflin, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Two things are certain in Elizabeth Gilbert’s first collection, Pilgrims: her characters possess minds of their own, and they can talk. Oh, can they talk. Gilbert is adept enough with one-line zingers (“He’s too dumb to bat both his eyes at the…
Kevin Young, Dear Darkness, poems: After the loss of his father, Young pays homage to his family with poems that carry the reader across landscapes of personal and cultural loss. (Knopf)
Paul Muldoon, Plan B, poems and photographs: In this extraordinary collaboration with Scottish photographer Norman McBeath, Muldoon’s poems reveal an uncanny relationship between word and image. (Enitharmon)
1-800-HOT-RIBS Poems by Catherine Bowman. Gibbs Smith, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. “I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,” Lowell wrote, as if foreseeing 1-800-hot-ribs, the debut collection by Catherine Bowman, a skilled young poet who seems to manipulate the language with a branding iron in one hand and a bullwhip…
J.-M. G. Le Clézio and the Nobel Prize: This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature selection has proven controversial, and to some, disappointing. One French critic fumed that the winner’s fiction lacked "universality," and even worse, often made it to the bestseller lists. The dean of German literary critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, expressed astonishment that the award…