In the Mouth, stories and novellas by Eileen Pollack (Four Way): How’s this for brave? One narrator, a son, is obsessed with fulfilling his dying father’s request for a belated circumcision, even at the son’s own hands. How’s this for unflinching? Another narrator, a mother, is troubled by something as normal but taboo as a…
Alice Hoffman, The Third Angel, a novel: Hoffman elegantly examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect. (Shaye Areheart)
Ann Beattie recommends Quick-Eyed Love, a memoir by Susan Garrett: “Garrett’s remarkable Quick-Eyed Love is the story of her mother, a photographer of children from Main Line Philadelphia who was not so lucky and not so famous as her acquaintance Mr. Steiglitz or the unstoppable Margaret Bourke-White. Implying questions about how a woman alone can…
Fire Ants, stories by Gerald Duff (New South Books): Most of the fifteen stories in Gerald Duff’s strong collection are filled with characters who are down on their luck. A mother’s mentally handicapped son is in jail because he didn’t understand that showing a gun to the cashier at the Sac’n Pac might be interpreted…
Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, poems: The speaker in this anticipated new volume of poems wonders: What is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? And how does one live in Ordinary Time-during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? (Norton)
DeWitt Henry recommends Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be, a memoir by Jen Trynin: "This memoir should be required reading for wannabe Janis Joplins; for others it offers a view of the corporate music world worthy of Nathaniel West. The monologues of soulless hucksters are pitch-perfect, and Trynin’s dream of becoming a rock star carries…
Meaning a Cloud, poems by J. W. Marshall (Oberlin): J. W. Marshall’s starkly beautiful first book, Meaning a Cloud, is a bang-up narrative of fracture and its aftermath—a sort of out-of-body reportage born of dumb luck injury and the careful exploration of what repair (or endurance) entails. The landscape is one of dissonance: scattering clouds,…
Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, a novel: Lee’s second novel is an incisive satire about art and commerce, fame and ethnicity, nature and development, and two estranged brothers, Lyndon and Woody Song. (Norton)
Jane Hirshfield recommends Dancing in Odessa, poems by Ilya Kaminsky: ” Dancing in Odessa is not newly published, but it is new to me, and deserves to be recommended. This is an intricate, muscular, startlingly powerful collection, one that amazes by image and statement, by its shaped whole, and by the sheer scope of its…
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