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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…
The Train to Lo Wu, stories by Jess Row (Dial): In Jess Row’s post-colonial Hong Kong, everything seems to be on the verge of disappearing. The city is a "mirage" that can be "swallowed in fog for days," the language slippery, "no tenses or articles, with seven different ways of saying the same syllable." No…
Robert Boswell recommends In the Shadows of the Sun, a novel by Alex Parsons: “This is a startlingly good novel. Set during World War II in rural New Mexico and the jungles of the Philippines, In the Shadows of the Sun is not a war story but a story of familial tragedy. One could argue…
Margot Livesey, Banishing Verona, a novel: A shy housepainter and a pregnant radio show host begin an affair in Livesey’s radiant, delicious new novel, and then they’re immediately separated, setting them off in transatlantic pursuit. (Holt)
George Garrett, Double Vision, a novel: As expected from Garrett, this novel is a witty tour de force, marrying fact and fiction about a gifted generation of American writers. (Alabama)
Rita Dove, American Smooth, poems: In her eighth superb collection, Dove pays homage to the grit and mother wit that inform our mongrel cultural heritage. (Norton)
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