On This Day, a novel by Nathaniel Bellows (HarperCollins): A compelling, heartfelt first novel about an eighteen-year-old brother and his twenty-year-old sister who are orphaned by their parents. Warren and Joan’s father dies of cancer, and, within months, their mother commits suicide. In their small Maine hometown, the siblings try to ward off a pushy…
Sails the Wind Left Behind, poems by Alessandra Lynch (Alice James): These poems do the remarkable job of making contemporary American poetry feel new again. Lynch takes risks at every turn, trying out new shapes in the mouth, flirting with narrative. A story of longing and desire gets told, but entirely on Lynch’s terms —…
The Guru of Love, a novel by Samrat Upadhyay (Houghton Mifflin): The debut novel of short-story writer Samrat Upadhyay is set in Kathmandu, but for most of the first half of The Guru of Love, the plot and the language aren’t so terribly exotic. This remarkable restraint is one of this wonderful novel’s many strengths,…
North True South Bright, poems by Dan Beachy-Quick (Alice James):The poems in this first book could belong to no other, so assured and singular is Beachy-Quick’s voice. These poems appear before us with the urgency of prayer, the fever pitch of a spell being cast, and the desire to comprehend the mysteries of language. Words…
How to Breathe Underwater, stories by Julie Orringer: The three stories that open this debut collection are pure gems, rollicking along with scintillating prose and surety. Just when you think they will stop—and lesser writers would stop—they keep going with inexorable momentum. Almost all of the stories involve youths imperiled—by accidents, illness, fate, and, most…
Thieves’ Latin, poems by Peter Jay Shippy: This prize-winning first collection provides proof that, as Peter Jay Shippy writes, "writ happens"—and that sometimes it is wonderful "writ." With a gift for breathtakingly original language, he leads us through the vast orchard of his imagination, where we can pluck and taste its astonishing fruit. Thieves’ Latin,…
Built in a Day, a novel by Steven Rinehart: The hero of this ambitious and smart debut novel, following on the heels of the story collection Kick in the Head, is a deceptively dangerous thirty-something dropout who is not above sleeping with his dead wife’s dead son’s teenaged girlfriend. Ultimately, this relentlessly entertaining story demonstrates…
Leaving Saturn Poems by Major Jackson. University of Georgia Press, $15.95 paper. Reviewed by Afaa M. Weaver. Major Jackson’s first collection, Leaving Saturn, is named for Sun Ra, the jazz composer and bandleader who claimed he had acquired his otherworldly gifts and powers on Saturn, where he’d been born. Invoking Sun Ra, you face all…
The King of Limbo Stories by Adrianne Harun. Mariner, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Don Lee. The ten stories in Harun’s first collection, The King of Limbo, tend toward the elliptical — tinged with mystery and occasionally fable, populated by loners who are estranged from loved ones. Haunted, grieving, the characters fitfully reach for solace, sometimes…
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