Three distinct periods divide the historiography—some might argue hagiography—of short story impresario Raymond Carver. During the early phase of Carver’s career, when he enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with editor Gordon Lish, Lish downplayed the idiosyncratic aspects of Carver’s biography in favor of a “Carver-as-Everyman” representation that mirrored Lish’s efforts to edit the “defining personal history”…
Denis Johnson’s new novella, Train Dreams—a brilliantly imagined elegy to the lost wilderness of the early 20th-century Idaho Panhandle and the “hard people of the northwest mountains” who occupied it—focuses on the life story of one such hard person, Robert Grainier. The novella opens in 1917 as Grainier, part of a railroad bridge-building crew, is…
“She loved fine things and she had no doubt that she deserved them. That is why it had not felt like stealing.” From taking cakes of Lux rose-scented soap from the bathroom cabinet to committing far more serious crimes, the two women in Ru Freeman’s stunning debut novel have disobeyed. The first is Latha, the…
When Susan Conley moves to China with her husband Tony and two little boys, she hopes for adventure, and for her family to grow “in that way you hear Americans do when they head east,” but she doesn’t know that cancer will play a role in that growth. Tony is fluent in Mandarin and thriving…
Essay anthologies are one of the perennials of American publishing, old and new titles shoaling into bookstores by the tens of thousands every year … the catch being that most are put forward not as essay anthologies, but as “composition readers,” created to encourage undergraduates to take an interest in the shapeliness of their own…
At 113 pages, How Like Foreign Objects is an ambitious and meaty first book, filled with poetry that is succinct and captivating. It is easy to be hooked by Orgera’s quick wit and deceptively straightforward syntax. Especially, as in “Sleeping with the Dictionary,” when she presents lines that offer immediate pleasure while pointing to a…
Khaled Mattawa’s fourth book marks his second breakthrough (his first was his debut, Ismalia Eclipse). The title poem, and centerpiece, is a 26 page visionary reorientation in verse of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Mattawa’s Tocqueville is not a mere revision of that historical document, but a poetry based on motion, where narrative doesn’t…
“No quiero morir. I don’t want to die. That may have been the last full sentence she ever spoke, maybe her very last words,” writes Francisco Goldman of his late wife Aura Estrada in his novel Say Her Name. A fiction writer and doctoral student at Columbia, Aura was just thirty when she died in…
The Library of America’s new anthology of Shirley Jackson’s work includes a chronology of the writer’s life, the story collection The Lottery, two novels, several uncollected or unpublished stories, and a “Biography of a Story.” Surprisingly, Joyce Carol Oates’ role as editor did not include writing an introduction or preface to the volume. One important…
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