You Have the Wrong Man Stories by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. First as a poet, and then as a novelist, Maria Flook has established herself as a writer with an astonishing vision — an artist who refuses to blink. Now, in her first book of stories, You Have the…
The Renaissance had its studies where the master taught his arts to apprentices, and today we have, for writers at least, the graduate writing schools where more than one master passes on the traditions. Stanford is one of those schools and has graduated such people (to name a few women) as Hannah Green who wrote…
Tom Sleigh's new book is introduced by the title poem, his translation from Dante's "Purgatorio," in which the speaker wakes from a dream of his own destruction. The brilliant long poem which follows it, "Endings," is a ranging philosophical narrative whose speaker has received a deadly medical prognosis and wills himself to penetrate and renew…
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Henry Holt, $28.00 cloth. Reviewed by Stewart O’Nan. In the years since his death, Richard Yates has been that saddest of literary celebrities, the beloved but forgotten author. What’s most shocking about this is that he wrote not one but three great books. His early masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, has…
For the thirteen years since Frank Stanford's suicide at twenty-nine, most of his nine books, which were all from small presses, have been difficult if not impossible to find. Leon Stokesbury has done an impressive job winnowing the more than one thousand pages of Stanford's published poetry to one hundred and ten, including six previously…
The Sixteen Pleasures A novel by Robert Hellenga. Soho Press, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. A character in The Sixteen Pleasures tells of a shop in Rome where petitioners in marital annulment cases can buy old postcards, old inks, and old uncanceled stamps, for the purpose of fabricating evidence from the past. This desire…
The Long Home Poems by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Poets’ voices seldom emerge fully formed: first books more often air promise than plenitude, recklessness than resonance. But Christian Wiman’s The Long Home, winner of the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize, speaks with mature authority. The Long Home…
Mary Caponegro opens The Star Café with the image of a "circular garland" that can only be appreciated if you "develop the telescope within yourself, your own inner eye, to see the beauty of the chain it makes, its variegated texture of feather, skin, fur; slimy or smooth." From the start, hers is no ordinary…
Jonathan Dee's prescient novel. The Lover of History, was published in 1990, just before the Gulf War, and save for a few brief, favorable reviews, the book was, more or less, ignored. One supposes this had something to do with the timing of publication. For though the novel is elegantly written, precisely observed, and thoughtful,…
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