Editor's Corner

Antonya Nelson, Some Fun, stories: The seven stories and novella in this witty, taut, and provocative collection prove to be a timely inventory of the state of family in America. (Scribner)

Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, a novel: Lee’s second novel is an incisive satire about art and commerce, fame and ethnicity, nature and development, and two estranged brothers, Lyndon and Woody Song. (Norton)

Joyce Peseroff, Eastern Mountain Time, poems: In her piercing fifth collection, Peseroff propels the reader from the pastoral to the tragic with bravura inventions of language. (Carnegie Mellon)

Jane Hirshfield, After, poems: A luminous investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with all existence. (HarperCollins)

Ron Carlson, Five Skies, a novel: A tour de force of grief, atonement, and the cost of loyalty, Carlson’s first novel in twenty-five years brings together two stoics and a teenage misanthrope in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains to build a ramp to nowhere. (Viking)

Alice Hoffman, Skylight Confessions, a novel: An elegant new novel charting the history of one family whose lives are forever changed by the loss of their mother. (Little, Brown)

Mary Gordon, Circling My Mother, a memoir: a rich, bittersweet memoir about Gordon’s mother—a single parent who weathered war, the Great Depression, and physical affliction—their relationship, and her role as a daughter. (Pantheon)

Howard Norman, Devotion, a novel: A haunting examination of romantic and filial love in the vast open spaces of Nova Scotia. (Houghton Mifflin)

Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music: Poems , poems: Pinsky’s first book of poems since 2000 discovers connections between things seemingly disparate in this ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by a major American poet. (FSG)