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 Mattawa’s Tocqueville is not a mere revision of that historical document, but a poetry based on motion, where narrative doesn’t…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work includes a chronology of the writer’s life, the story collection The Lottery, two novels, several uncollected or unpublished stories, and a “Biography of a Story.”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…
Dalton’s second novel begins: “A night breeze lifted the dark skirts of the forest.” This sensuous image escorts us into Kindermann Forest Summer Camp in rural Missouri. Here, all the camp counselors are skinny-dipping. We soon learn that elderly Schuller Kindermann will have none of this at his camp. Out they go, in come replacements:…
Graham Foust’s, poem “My Graham Foust,” caught my attention when I first read it in The Nation (November, 2007). That piece, with its slang, wit, and formal play, is emblematic of this collection: Gone’s his fleshy shovel. Gone’s his ticket; gone’s his train. Gone’s the friend who stepped away and almost saved him. Gone’s the…
C. Dale Young’s third book, Torn, is a tug of war between darkness and tenderness. The contest, in Young’s capable hands, frames, influences, or explicitly dictates the book’s more pointed question: are we as empty and limited as the words we depend upon? Poets may know this better than most, but it’s nonetheless a sobering…
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