Editor's Corner

Ann Beattie, Park City: New and Selected Stories: Nearly five hundred pages long, this generous and sparkling collection of thirty-six stories is as much a cultural chronicle as it is a showcase of Beattie’s enormous talents. She goes from the seventies to the present (eight of the stories are brand-new), incisively charting the relational and…

Andre Dubus, Meditations from a Movable Chair, essays: This new collection of twenty-five essays is a radiant follow-up to Broken Vessels. Confined to a wheelchair since a 1986 accident, Dubus reflects on writing, Catholicism, divorce, family, and everyday life in a handicapped-inaccessible world. Resonant, thoughtful, passionate, and superbly written. (Knopf)

George Garrett, Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments: New and Old Poems, 1957-1997: Garrett has long been admired for his fiction, but in the past forty years, he had amassed a large body of poetry as well. From bawdy satires to quiet lyrics, Garrett’s poems splendidly showed his affection for the world through unique sensibilities….

DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson, Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men, essays: This remarkable, moving collection offers nineteen essays on a subject about which very little has been published: the relationship between father and daughter. Henry and McPherson have broken new ground, soliciting stirring, often heartbreaking essays from the likes of Rick Bass, Phillip Lopate,…

Howard Norman, The Museum Guard, a novel: Norman’s third novel is an exquisite tale set in Halifax just before World War II. DeFoe Russett, orphaned at age eight, lives in a hotel and works as a museum guard with his uncle. DeFoe begins a tormenting affair with Imogen Linny, the caretaker of a small Jewish…

Derek Walcott, The Bounty, poems: The 1992 Nobel Prize winner lovingly evokes his native land, the island of St. Lucia, in this luminous new book. Haunting, magnificent, The Bounty gives us Walcott at the top of his form. (Noonday)

Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter, a novel: About one of the most controversial figures in American history, the abolitionist John Brown, Banks’s epic novel is narrated by Brown’s son and comrade, Owen. The novel not only traces Brown’s crusade against slavery, leading to his famous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, but also becomes a deeply moving…

Mary Gordon, Spending, a novel: Gordon explores new territory with an indelibly vibrant, witty character, Monica Szabo, a fifty-year-old artist who decides to accept a handsome commodities trader as her patron. He gives her money, sex, and poses as a model. However, when her new series of paintings makes her rich, famous, and controversial, her…

Donald Hall, Without, poems: In his fourteenth collection, Hall writes with grief, grace, and courage about the poet Jane Kenyon, his late wife. The first half sketches her illness and death. The second half is comprised of verse letters he addresses to Kenyon in the ensuing year. This book stands as a poignant and powerful…