Fields of Light A memoir by Joseph Hurka. Pushcart Press, $24.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In this debut book of nonfiction, American Joseph Hurka, son of a Czech anti-Communist resistance fighter, offers a generous, kind, and thoughtful memoir about his desire to inhabit his father Josef’s past, and thereby give both of them a…
Full Moon Boat Poems by Fred Marchant. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Its title and first poem proclaim Fred Marchant’s fine Full Moon Boat an odyssey inverted, defining an alternative to the ideal of the heroic return from war. Pressure from the family to adopt the martial model comes early, an…
Wild Ride Essays by Bia Lowe. HarperCollins, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Bonnie Friedman. Bia Lowe’s lovely first book, Wild Ride, uniquely combines nature essays with personal narrative. Each piece — composed of succulent, sweet prose — is a thought pagoda, ideas storied one atop another, from sneezes to alfalfa to sexual betrayal to Halley’s comet…
Professor Laura Coltelli of the University of Pisa has devoted many years to the oral and written literature, and the varied culture, of American Indians. She now brings us a revealing volume of interviews with eleven contemporary Indian writers. Six are women: Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, and Leslie…
Winning the City by Theodore Weesner. Summit Books. $17.95 cloth. Winning the City is a fine novel, a crisply written story about a young boy's struggle to define himself. Dale Wheeler's position on the school basketball team is unjustly taken from him, and what Dale does in response gives the novel its drive and theme….
Winter Range A novel by Claire Davis. Picador, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In Winter Range, Idaho writer Claire Davis offers a debut novel that effectively evokes small-town life on the Montana range and culminates in a breathtaking series of artfully constructed calamities. Predominantly from the third-person intimate points of view of the three…
The publication of Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio is to me a personal event because Tillie Olsen herself has had such large effect upon me — as teacher, as friend, as a writer reverenced long before I met her — and these remarks do not pretend to be either objective or dispassionate. Rather, they are meant in…
You Have the Wrong Man Stories by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. First as a poet, and then as a novelist, Maria Flook has established herself as a writer with an astonishing vision — an artist who refuses to blink. Now, in her first book of stories, You Have the…
The Renaissance had its studies where the master taught his arts to apprentices, and today we have, for writers at least, the graduate writing schools where more than one master passes on the traditions. Stanford is one of those schools and has graduated such people (to name a few women) as Hannah Green who wrote…
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