Editor's Corner

  Gary Soto, Partly Cloudy, poems: A humorous and tender collection of poems giving testimony to the trials and folly of being in young, sweet, uncontrollable teenage love. (Harcourt)  

Kevin Young, Dear Darkness, poems: After the loss of his father, Young pays homage to his family with poems that carry the reader across landscapes of personal and cultural loss. (Knopf)  

  Sherman Alexie, Face, poems and short prose: In his first full collection in nine years, Alexie shows his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. (Hanging Loose)

  Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, stories: These stories display Boswell’s extraordinary range, from the end of two women’s marriages, to a young man’s obsession with his fortune, to another man’s self-discovery on a mountaintop. (Graywolf)

  Ron Carlson, The Signal, a novel: Carlson’s love for the mountains and mastery of fiction radiate in the pages of this thrilling story about a couple who ventures into the Wyoming wilderness only to discover the true nature of their wounds. (Penguin)

  James Carroll, Practicing Catholic, nonfiction: Carroll sets this searching examination of his faith against the history of the Catholic Church in America, and the sometimes glorious, sometimes discouraging actions of its leaders. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

  Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica, poems: In this book-length lyric narrative inspired by history, Dove recreates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist, the son of a white woman and an "African prince," whose conflict with Ludwig van Beethoven over a woman evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. (Norton)

  B. H. Fairchild, Usher, poems: This new collection of poems employs dramatic monologues and embraces a range of subject matters and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. (Norton)

  Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters, a novel: Hoffman’s latest book tells of sisters who create their own magical world to escape a tragic encounter that has forever changed their lives. (Areheart)