Meeting with a young man torn between progressive and fundamentalist ideals, Zahoor, an elderly paleontologist, shows him the cupolas of the Great Mosque in Cordoba. It was built in a period, he argues, when Islam showed a different face to the world, a time when "faith meant devotion to multiple pleasures–mathematics, poetry, music, anatomy, calligraphy……
The Maverick Room, poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis (Graywolf): In this marvelous and accomplished volume of poems, Ellis works the page the way his musical subjects (crooners, masters of funk, DC-based Go-Go bands) work a room: with rhythm, sass, and self-deprecating wit. The sonic effects of these poems duplicate the experience of listening to live…
Philip Levine recommends Sky, poems by Christopher Buckley: "Buckley is a California poet who—though he has published at least ten books—seems little known in the East. His poems are both Western and universal. It is the landscape of California that serves as the backdrop to the striving for significance that enriched his boyhood in Santa…
Mark Doty, School of the Arts, poems: Incisive and transcendent, Doty’s seventh collection contemplates the creative process and eternal questions of love and loss, desire and despair. (HarperCollins)
Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated, poems: Williamson’s verse from the last three decades are collected with new poems that beautifully draw his oeuvre together. (Chicago)
Book Description In a grimy boardinghouse in a dismal Parisian neighborhood, Balzac sets the stage for his 1834 study of paternal love, greed, envy, and despair. Pêre Goriot tells the story of a nineteenth-century counterpart to King Lear, a father so blindly devoted to his undeserving daughters that his tragic realization??I loved them too much…
Wedding Day, poems by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon): Intimate and hypnotic, the poems of Levin’s wonderful second book operate as a lens through which we are simultaneously granted two views: one into the darker, private interior of the self, the other of an outer-world turned otherworldly by the poet’s eye. Whether turning her gaze inward…
The Return Message, poems by Tessa Rumsey (Norton): The foremost organizing principal of this fascinating second volume is the manner in which Rumsey pairs poems beneath shared titles and erects a dialogue between the shorter, pastoral poems that occupy the left pages and the longer, cityscape poems on the right. The dense scent of wisteria…
Nice Big American Baby, stories by Judy Budnitz (Knopf): The breadth of these stories, from Kafkaesque surrealism to tightly wrought naturalism, is breathtaking in itself, but what unites this extraordinary collection is its unnerving verve and vision. There isn’t anything Judy Budnitz can’t or won’t do, and right when you think she couldn’t possibly be…
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