Editor's Corner

Charles Simic, Night Picnic, poems: Playful and incandescent, these new poems also show more of Simic’s epigrammatic and darker side, reminding us of the lyricism in daily life. (Harcourt)

Ann Beattie, The Doctor’s House, a novel: A fascinating, emotionally complex chronicle of a Cambridge copyeditor who is mourning her husband’s accidental death; her brother, who is seeking out women from high school for sex; and their alcoholic mother-all of them trying to unfetter themselves from the tyrannical doctor who was father and husband. (Scribner)

Robert Boswell, Century’s Son, a novel: A Midwestern college professor and her activist-turned-garbage-collector husband are riven and bound by their son’s suicide ten years before, as well as by their daughter, who’s become a teenage mother. Into this exhilarating and penetrating portrait comes the professor’s Russian father, who claims to be a century old. (Knopf)

Mark Doty, Source, poems: Doty’s sixth book of poetry magnificently explores desire and the paradox of selfhood in matters of public life and private struggle, with boldly colored, lyrical scenes from New York, Provincetown, Vermont, and Latin America. (HarperCollins)

Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins, stories: Nine incisive stories and a bravura novella that explicate the sins of adultery and lust. These dramas unfold in Maine, Connecticut, New Orleans, Michigan, and elsewhere with flawless execution. (Knopf)

Donald Hall, The Painted Bed, poems: Hall’s masterful thirteenth collection of poems expand on the themes of love, death, and mourning. The works here are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing-“mania is melancholy reversed,” he writes. (Houghton Mifflin)

Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, personal essays: With artful, witty, illuminating prose, Levine recounts his youth in Detroit and his adulthood in California and Spain, and celebrates his mentors John Berryman and Yvor Winters. (Michigan)

Howard Norman, The Haunting of L., a novel: The final book in Norman’s Canadian trilogy, this beautifully crafted novel-set in Manitoba and Halifax-becomes a chilling fable about moral blindness, spirit photography, adultery, artistic ambition, and greed. (FSG)

Maura Stanton, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, stories: Ten darkly funny short stories that prove to be unpredictable, smart, and lively, with tales ranging from a glimpse of Gertrude Stein playing Ping-Pong with a G.I. in Paris during World War II to a woman discovering that her dead sister had written a bad…