By now, many people have heard of the 1986 accident that led to the amputation of writer Andre Dubus's left leg and cost him the use of his right one. Driving home, Dubus stopped to aid two motorists, a brother and sister. An oncoming car hit Dubus and the brother, killing the young man, but…
When Anne Sexton died in her garage, asphyxiated by exhaust, in October of 1974, a generation of writers and readers were jolted, if not quite surprised. Death had been a main subject of hers; yes, poetry was, in Peter Davison's phrase, a "dangerous trade." When Sexton was twenty-eight, living the hemmed-in life of an unfulfilled…
One of the things the novel can and often does do for its readers is to extend their range of sympathy, to make them see with a new clarity groups of people that might otherwise be forgotten except in statistical charts, and to make them feel that the individuals inside these groups partake of our…
Apology for Want Poems by Mary Jo Bang. Middlebury College, $25.00 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. There is quiet anarchy in the spare poems of Mary Jo Bang’s haunting first collection, Apology for Want. The terrain is decidedly American and familiar — one of shopping malls and consumption in the “flinty age of…
Camellia Street A novel by Mercè Rodoreda, translated by David H. Rosenthal. Graywolf Press, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by James Carroll. “They abandoned me on Camellia Street, in front of a garden gate, and the night watchman found me early the next morning.” So begins Camellia Street, a small masterpiece of fiction by Mercè Rodoreda, the…
Beneath the body and blood of the Eucharist, invoked and present throughout Thylias Moss's third collection, lie the bones — the skeletons in closets, the fingers worked, the heart's durable cage. "It's hard to bandage your life with bones," the poet writes in "Vicious Circles in the Trenches," but she will not be comforted by…
Central Square A novel by George Packer. Graywolf, $24.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is a Cambridge, Massachusetts, with which few outsiders are familiar — the neighborhood that is the title of George Packer’s second novel, Central Square, which squats between posh Harvard and MIT, blighting the main avenue with “its discount shops, foreign…
Atlantis and Heaven’s Coast Poems and a memoir by Mark Doty. HarperCollins, $12.00 paper and $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Mark Doty’s third collection, My Alexandria, won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award, and his new volume of poems, Atlantis, crowns its predecessor’s substantial achievements. Its mythical title notwithstanding, the realm…
Cheaters and Other Stories Stories by Dean Albarelli. St. Martin’s, $20.95 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. Dean Albarelli’s Cheaters and Other Stories is a collection about moral responsibility, as considered by people who have, for the most part, disappointed themselves. “What he needed was the energy and idealism of his younger self, back when he…
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