Editor's Corner

DeWitt Henry, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, a novel: This incisive novel heartbreakingly portrays Anna Maye Potts, whose life is upended by her widowed father’s death and by her younger sister’s subsequent attempt to take possession of the family house. The first winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. (Tennessee)

Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome, poems: A compelling twelfth collection that gathers work from the past twenty years, as well as some new and previously uncollected work. Publishers Weekly astutely predicts that readers will want this volume for its “heady mix of gothic foreboding, racial history and realpolitik, biblical and Attic allusion, and sexual longing.” (Wesleyan)

Al Young, The Sound of Dreams Remembered, poems: Containing nearly one hundred fifty poems from the past ten years, this volume serves as a playful, shrewd, hip, and occasionally shocking record of millennial America. (Creative Arts)

Elizabeth Spires, I Am Arachne: Fifteen Greek and Roman Myths, children’s fiction: In this engaging, whimsical collection, fifteen heroes and heroines give their own dramatic, first-person accounts of their tales of wonder, woe, love, and jealousy. (Frances Foster/FSG)

Maura Stanton, Glacier Wine, poems: Stanton’s fifth collection marries a delightful comic innocence with worldly skepticism as she slyly examines phobias, historical anecdotes, fables, and travelogues. (Carnegie Mellon)

Gary Soto, Poetry Lover, novel: In this touching sequel to the novel Nickel and Dime, Soto once again combines humor and pathos with his heartwarming portrait of Silver Mendez, a down-and-out Chicano poet trying to revive himself and his career. (New Mexico)

Ann Beattie, Perfect Recall, stories: Eleven perfect stories from the winner of the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Beattie defined the zeitgeist of the seventies and eighties, and now she deftly places her baby-boomers in the uneasy, comic confusion of middle-age. (Scribner)

James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, nonfiction: In this stunning and audacious book, Carroll charts two thousand years of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church, and poignantly recalls the crisis of faith it caused in his own life as a Catholic. (Houghton Mifflin)