Editor's Corner

George Garrett, Empty Bed Blues, stories: The fifteen stories in Garrett’s thrilling collection are deeply concerned with the old verities of love and death. (Missouri)

Carl Phillips, Quiver of Arrows, selected poems: This generous selection from Phillips’s eight books showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America’s most distinctive, original voices, meditating on desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex and human reason. (FSG)

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a novel: In his first book for young adults, Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation for an all-white high school. This heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written tale received the 2007 National Book Award…

Andrea Barrett, The Air We Breathe, a novel: Barrett’s exquisite, much-anticipated new novel unfolds in the fall of 1916, when America was debating whether to enter the European war, and focuses on a group of tuberculosis patients in an isolated Adirondacks sanatorium. (Norton)

Amy Bloom, Away, a novel: Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic story of young Lillian Leyb, who comes to American alone after her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom. (Random House)

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)