Editors’ Shelf
Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Ann Beattie recommends Movie Stars by Jack Pendarvis (Dzanc Books, 2016). “The humor, and the (forgive me) world view in these stories makes me think of Robert Plunket. No one else would conclude a story with the dog looking out the window, ‘white forepaws on the window ledge, safely behind the glass, staring at the cat with sick superiority.’”
Robert Boswell recommends All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side by Rus Bradburd (Chicago Review Press, May 2018). “A deeply personal story of gun violence in Chicago among a network of people connected to basketball. It could not be more timely. Terrific book.”
Peter Ho Davies recommends Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2018). “A debut collection of interlinked stories that read like classics (the title itself nods back to the Mahabharata). The quiet gravity of these pieces—one about an immigrant butcher in New Jersey comes to mind in particular—is profoundly affecting.”
Lauren Groff recommends Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Hogarth, 2017). “This is one of the wittiest novels I read in 2017, and it has stayed with me for months into the new year. Sally Rooney is still quite young, but already deeply accomplished, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends The Carrying by Ada Limón (Milkweed, August 2018). “Ada Limón’s precise music, clarity of image, and signature inhabitance of the imaginative and actual realms offer once again, in this new book, confirmation: Limón is a vital presence in the landscape of current American poems, a poet continually expanding the canvas.”
Jane Hirshfield recommends The Beekeeper by Dunya Mikhail (New Directions, March 2018). “I have long admired Dunya Mikhail as a poet. In The Beekeeper, English-language readers may discover for the first time Dunya Mikhail as a journalist equally astonishing in her powers. This harrowing book, consummately constructed and written, presents the stories of a number of Yazidi Iraqi women, imprisoned by Daesh; of the local beekeeper who helps some of them escape; and of Mikhail’s own experience, as a person fully present to the events she brings into words, as a person fully present to her own life.”
Robert Pinsky recommends Fort Necessity by David Gewanter (The University of Chicago Press, February 2018). “A truly unique, unified, penetrating book of poems about our time, using documentary material with the verve of art.”
Robert Pinsky recommends Carol Muske’s Blue Rose (Penguin Poets, April 2018). “Intense focus, gorgeous music, a demonstration that the perspectives of gender can be expansive, increasing the range of feeling and subject.”
Gerald Stern recommends R E D by Chase Berggrun (Birds, LLC, May 2018). “R E D is a single long poem of erasure derived from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I find it to be a deeply moving book that deals essentially with the abuse of women and male power run amok. The language is lovely and the narrative, though it is a book of poetry, is as clear and ineluctable as a novel. It is highly readable and, as I say, original.”
Gerald Stern recommends Amerika by Franz Kafka (Kurt Wolff, 1927). “Amerika, the title given by Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, to his early unfinished novel written in 1912, is a kind of bildungsroman and picaresque novel, which reminds me of Augie March and many other such novels. It is a story of a sixteen-year-old boy’s adventures in the New World. It is unfinished and ends with a proposed trip to a place called ‘Oklahoma.’ It anticipates the two later famous novels of Kafka’s, The Trial and The Castle.”
Gerald Stern recommends Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss (Harper Collins, 2017). “This is a fantasy in which Kafka does not die at the age of forty in 1924, but secretly moves to Palestine, which in the ’30s was a British mandate, and it imagines Kafka continuing to write and live in obscurity in his later years, in Israel itself.”
Dan Wakefield recommends Silver Girl by Leslie Pietrzyk (The Unnamed Press, February 2018). “A rich, full, no-holds-barred novel of the struggles of a young woman from a small-town, Midwestern, financially stressed family to coexist with her diamond-studded roommate at a snobby university and fight her way to sexual and intellectual adulthood.”
