The Monsters of Templeton, a novel by Lauren Groff (Voice): What’s fresh and fun about The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is how it doesn’t fit neatly into one contemporary genre. It’s literary, it’s historical, and it’s peppered with mysteries, ghosts, and "monsters." Even the packaging of the book is a delight—full of illustrations,…
Journey to the Beach of the Dead, poems by Richard Blanco (Arizona): The speaker of Richard Blanco’s second book serves as both tourist and guide to the reader throughout the relentless and far-flung journeying the poems undertake. Moving from otherness to origin, Blanco pulls away from such locales as Italy and Guatemala to reenter his…
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, poems by Lisa Olstein (Copper Canyon): Olstein’s first book weaves its reader into a sensual and fibrous dreamscape inhabited by totem animals, somnambulist lovers hypnotic with longing, and symbols boldly acknowledged for their inherent duplicity: "Insert bird for sorrow," her speaker insists. While the poems in this book often operate as…
Secondhand World, a novel by Katherine Min (Knopf): In this lucid and lyrical debut, Min offers the magnetic story of Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, an estranged Korean-American teenager struggling to understand just how it is that she, the lowly daughter, has managed to survive her ill-fated younger brother and the murder-suicide of her two parents….
Sanctuary, poems by Adrienne Su (Manic D): Do not allow the clarity of address in this striking second book to distract you from its many demands: Su’s approach is risky in its sheer honesty and fierce by way of simplicity. The topics she addresses are as challenging as the formal rigors she undertakes and sustains…
Permanent Visitors, stories by Kevin Moffett (Iowa): In this funny and acutely perceptive debut collection, Moffett has an eye for the tragic that is also comic: a mother’s unexpected death from a bad oyster is followed by the widower’s hosting of a party of "challenged" youth; an émigré’s desire for sex with "gazebo angels" runs…
Sea of Faith, poems by John Brehm (Wisconsin): Very few poets seem able to land all grown-up on the pages of their first books—often they are tentative, anonymous—but John Brehm arrives with a great chorus trailing, and he does so without apology, which is a delight because he’s a very interesting man, it seems, one…
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, stories by Yiyun Li (Random House): The stories in this debut book are boldly plotted, deeply felt, and slyly humorous. The overall effect is of having read a number of powerful novels, intertwined by setting and race (all the stories involve Chinese or Chinese Americans). In "Extra," a lonely…
Green Squall, poems by Jay Hopler (Yale): Hopler’s Floridian terrain is as seductive as it is venomous. Amid this wizardry of growth, we find the speaker stunned into stasis and paralyzed by ennui. Much of this book centers on Desire as a figure; in the wonderful longer poem "Of Hunger and Human Freedom," Hopler further…
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