The Best Place to Be, a novel in stories by Lesley Dormen (Simon & Schuster): In this debut fiction, Dormen successfully captures all the pivotal moments in a woman’s life—dealing with college, facing the death of her mother, arriving at middle age with grace and humor—although not necessarily in chronological order. "I didn’t have any…
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…
The Cottagers, a novel by Marshall N. Klimasewiski (Norton): This arresting first book explores the mysterious and envious nature of the friendship between two couples on vacation at the Vancouver Island resort town of East Sooke. Thrown into this catastrophic mix is nineteen-year-old Cyrus Collingswood, a potential genius who just might have a tendency toward…
Controvertibles, poems by Quan Barry (Pittsburgh): The poems in Barry’s second book springboard from a wealth of subjects as the speaker seeks to close the gulf between the concrete and the abstract; whether interrogating the Shroud of Turin, meditating on seahorses with "fused jaws & stalked eyes argentine," or revisiting the murder of Emmett Till,…
The Birthdays, a novel by Heidi Pitlor (Norton): This debut traces a family reunion precipitated by Joe Miller’s seventy-fifth birthday and complicated by his wife Vera’s contemplation of an affair and the three different pregnancies involving their three different children. The kaleidoscopic effect of the roving third-person intimate point of view creates a crystalline portrait…
The City Is a Riding Tide, a novel by Rebecca Lee (Simon & Schuster): Fixed on a pair of Manhattan nonprofit workers who want to build an ill-fated healing center on a perilous bank of the Yangtze River, this is an urgent story infused with lyricism and populated by flawed people who both use one…
Mosquito, poems by Alex Lemon (Tin House): The poems in Alex Lemon’s striking first book document the experience of undergoing brain surgery, an agonizing recovery, and the sudden discovery of Eros, who finally emerges as the ultimate emblem of survival. Careful yet raw, the fresh sutures that comprise the lines in many of these poems…
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