Editor's Corner

Don Lee, Yellow, stories: Eight short stories that offer a fresh, contemporary vision of what it means to be Asian in America, a post-immigrant examination of identity, race, and love. (Norton)

Thomas Lux, The Street of Clocks, poems: In his first all-new volume in seven years, Lux delivers a mesmerizing series of lyrical monologues, imbued with characteristic playfulness and lucidity, in language both distilled and musical. (Houghton Mifflin)

Gail Mazur, They Can’t Take That Away from Me, poems: Mazur’s sparkling, compassionate, and illuminating fourth collection measures the passage of time-the body’s desires and frailties, illness and death, children and parents, the intimacies of marriage. (Chicago)

Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, poems: A comprehensive selection from Muldoon’s eight books of poetry, this brilliant volume presents an astonishing range of moods and subjects, showing a poet reinventing himself at every turn. (FSG)

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)

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, nonfiction: A dazzling meditation on the great Dutch still-life paintings of the seventeenth century, and on objects as vessels of human feeling and as occasions of intimacy, pleasure, mortality, and time. (Beacon)

Marilyn Hacker, translation of Here There Was Once a Country, poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata: A searing translation of the poems of a prolific Lebanese writer who has always straddled two cultures, the Arabic and the French. Hacker luminously brings to life Khoury-Ghata’s intimate, mysterious, and unique voice. (Oberlin)