Edward Hirsch, Special Orders, poems: With a mixture of grief and joy, Hirsch assesses “the major triumphs, the major failures” of his life so far, revealing a new fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions. (Knopf)
Abide with Me, a novel by Elizabeth Strout (Random House): This second novel by the author of the extraordinary Amy and Isabelle further mines the conflicts, contradictions, and complications of small town life. Tyler Caskey, an observant and vulnerable minister in West Annett, Maine, must concomitantly confront the death of his relatively young wife, the…
Above the Houses, short stories by Susan Engberg (Delphinium): In her fourth collection of stories, Susan Engberg explores the tentative, testing movements of people recently unmoored by change. Spouses die; marriages end or begin; there are new towns, new houses, new bodies to navigate. The landscape can feel hostile. A baby wanders alone down a…
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark And Termite, a novel: In this extraordinary novel of war, resolution and recognition, generational inheritance, and the power of loss and love, Phillips tells the story of two siblings struggling to understand the secrets of their family history. (Knopf)
DeWitt Henry, Safe Suicide, essays: These interconnected essays tell the story of an ordinary man—a father of two, a husband, a long-time teacher and editor—and his extraordinary struggles for happiness and truth, offering moments of powerful insights and piercing revelations. (Red Hen Press)
Natural History, poems by Dan Chiasson (Knopf): Dan Chiasson’s second book offers up a complex weave of personae—guises as various as Horace, Pliny the Elder, and Randall Jarrell. From behind these many veils, the poems meditate upon the intersections of lived and literary experience, the mythical and the day-to-day. Chiasson playfully subverts the dramatic…
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…
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