Book Review

rev. of Typical American by Gish Jen

There's comedy in Gish Jen's Typical American, comedy tempered in wry and refreshing ways. It's the story of a big-eared, bumbling Chinese boy who makes his way in America almost in spite of himself: unassimilated and adrift in an indifferent Manhattan, he is rescued by a long-lost sister, gets a Ph.D. in engineering, and then…

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rev. of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro's justifiably acclaimed novel, The Remains of the Day, has been considered unique due to the fact that the writer, a Japanese who grew up in England, has demonstrated his brilliance in projecting his imagination into the mental habits of a British butler, Stevens, who serves in the household of Lord Darlington. Stevens' language…

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rev. of Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver

Unravelling A novel by Elizabeth Graver. Hyperion, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Caroline Langston. In Elizabeth Graver’s quietly enchanting first novel, Unravelling, the longings of the young narrator, Aimee Slater, are strikingly vivid and contemporary, yet the story is set in nineteenth-century New England, at the juncture between the region’s rural, puritanical past and all the…

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rev. of The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo

Several nights after the day his book reached the counters of three of Missoula's bookstores (the fourth sells prose pornography), Richard Hugo was offering the following terse explanation of the significance of the title, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, to a group of local admirers: "Sir Walter Scott wrote a poem called "The Lady…

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rev. of The River at Wolf by Jean Valentine

The River at Work Poems by Jean Valentine. Alice James Books, $8.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. There are some poets whose work incites a reader to metaphor. This is especially true of those whose ultimate subject is the unsayable, the numinous — where the risks taken by the poet must provoke her reader into…

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rev. of The Light the Dead See: The Selected Poems of Frank Stanford

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…

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rev. of The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga

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…

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rev. of The Long Home by Christian Wiman

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…

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rev. of The Star Cafe by Mary Caponegro

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…

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