Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska, a memoir by Seth Kantner (Milkweed): Because of its engagement with the American imagination, authentic Alaska is all too often lost in overly romanticized tales of survival, or politically motivated descriptions of "barren, lifeless tundra." The best antidote for this, perhaps, is a rooted literary voice that…
What a pleasure to find a poet whose sense of risk and honesty drives her to complicate the emotions and attitudes of her poems — so that sorrow might be suddenly hijacked by bravado, or delight by anger and humor — rather than to wrap us up a neat little parcel of agreeable "sensitivities." In…
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir by Haruki Murakami (Knopf): This plain-speaking, suggestive memoir by the prolific and internationally acclaimed novelist Murakami is part runner’s diary, part writer’s handbook, part spiritual meditation. "Writing honestly about running and writing honestly about myself are nearly the same thing," he states. His example…
Irish Elegies, personal essays by Chris Arthur (Palgrave-Macmillan): Irish Elegies is Chris Arthur’s fourth book of new essays in a series that includes Irish Nocturnes (1999), Irish Willow (2002), and Irish Haiku (2005), all published by the Davies Group, all fondly recommended by this reviewer. Irish Elegies departs from the trilogy by joining the ranks…
Collections of Nothing, a memoir by William Davies King (Chicago): There is, perhaps, only a continuum linking habit, hobby, obsession, and pathology. William Davies King, in his new memoir, stunning and smart, insists, "I collect nothing—with a passion." Throughout this quirky little book, the author riffs on the nothing that is not there, and the…
Water: Nine Stories, stories by Alyce Miller (Sarabande): By its title, Miller’s collection offers a fitting symbol for the multiple forms of desire that take shape within her characters. Filled with beautiful phrasings and descriptions of longing, the book sometimes shows desire’s fluidity as a result of age; other times, as in the story "Ice,"…
Above the Houses, short stories by Susan Engberg (Delphinium): In her fourth collection of stories, Susan Engberg explores the tentative, testing movements of people recently unmoored by change. Spouses die; marriages end or begin; there are new towns, new houses, new bodies to navigate. The landscape can feel hostile. A baby wanders alone down a…
In the Mouth, stories and novellas by Eileen Pollack (Four Way): How’s this for brave? One narrator, a son, is obsessed with fulfilling his dying father’s request for a belated circumcision, even at the son’s own hands. How’s this for unflinching? Another narrator, a mother, is troubled by something as normal but taboo as a…
Fire Ants, stories by Gerald Duff (New South Books): Most of the fifteen stories in Gerald Duff’s strong collection are filled with characters who are down on their luck. A mother’s mentally handicapped son is in jail because he didn’t understand that showing a gun to the cashier at the Sac’n Pac might be interpreted…
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