There are quadrants and orbitals of poetry which fit neatly into no category. The first poem I encountered by Reginald Shepherd (from his first collection, Some Are Drowning) startled me completely with its strange intense interiority. It started with a narrative scrap, and then, like a pearl diver taking a breath and stepping over the…
Suzanne Berne’s father was six years old when his mother died, less than two weeks before Christmas day in 1932. “We were told she was gone,” Berne remembers him repeating to her and her siblings. “No one ever said where.” In Missing Lucile, Berne, an award-winning novelist, sets out to find her grandmother and to…
If restoration is, according to Nietzsche, an act of revenge, then Christina Pugh in her second book enacts vengeance that seems devoid of fear, primarily because the object of this vengeance remains a mystery, beyond narrative construction. Pugh’s Restoration: Poems defies and resists, as well as exposes, our Pavlovian desires for the explicatory and the…
For newcomers to Howard Norman’s fiction, this, his sixth novel, will seem deliberately and beguilingly odd. There is, for example, a murder acknowledged from the outset. The first person narrator, Wyatt Hillyer, is writing an account of his life to his estranged daughter, Marlais, who was taken from him as a child by her mother,…
Robert Frost advises that the surest way to reach a reader’s heart is via the ear; Ellen Bryant Voigt, in her illuminating contribution to Graywolf’s "The Art Of" series, maps out the cerebral pathways along the ear-to-heart journey. A gifted poet and teacher, Voigt has long been masterful at breaking down–and thus building up–the music…
Adam Zagajewski’s newest collection of poems touches on many of the motifs and themes that his poetry is known for. The book is divided into three parts, very carefully arranged, almost like a musical composition. Certain subjects introduced in the first section reappear later in several variations, like Joseph Street in the Krakow Jewish quarter,…
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…
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