Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Margot Livesey recommends Stranger from Across the Sea, by Regina McBride (Green City Books, 2024). “As soon as Violet O’Halloran arrives at St. Dymphna’s School and meets the blind girl, Indira Sharma, I was captivated by this evocative novel set in Ireland and New York. McBride’s characters are so full of longing and passion and I couldn’t wait to find out what would happen next.”
Antonya Nelson recommends Big Time, by Rus Bradburd (Etruscan Press, 2024). “This novel follows in the hilarious tradition of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, and Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, a hilarious satiric send-up of how we do college these days. Welcome to Coors State University!”
Joyce Peseroff recommends At Risk, by Teresa Cader (Ashland Poetry Press, 2024). “Cader’s fourth book of poems, chosen by Mark Doty as winner of the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize, is a masterful exploration of her Polish family’s legacy–war and displacement, rapture and survival. As a first-generation American, Cader is alert to those left behind by history and by the fractures of contemporary life. Compassionate, lyrical, witty, smart, and ambitious, Cader’s poems create a language that illuminates the fears and passions of a collective present fused in the heat of the past. At Risk is a necessary, startling, and brilliant book.”
Lloyd Schwartz recommends The Flounder: and Other Stories, by John Fulton (Blackwater Press, 2023). “These subtle, humane, understated, yet profound stories give us human beings we come to know and care about very deeply. They would make great movies, yet Fulton’s narrative gives us the complex insights movies can’t. I was frequently moved to tears.”
Rosanna Warren recommends Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (New Directions, 2023). “The best novel I’ve read in months: Erpenbeck lures us through a labyrinth of sexual and political pathology, as the last years of the German Democratic Republic are felt through, suffered through, a sado-masochistic love affair. Eros and politics horribly entangled. The prose sets off sparks.”
