Editor's Corner

Sue Miller: The Distinguished Guest (HarperCollins),a novel about a couple who must care for the husband’s mother, an acclaimed author-a situation that forces them all to reconcile with the past.

Gerald Stern: Odd Mercy (W.W. Norton, July 1995), a new book of poetry, including a 56-page poem called “Hot Dog” about a street woman in New York’s East Village.

Donald Hall: Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews (Univ. of Michigan), a collection of writings in defense of the vitality of contemporary American poetry.

Philip Levine: The Simple Truth (Knopf), a collection of new poems, of which Harold Bloom says, “I wonder if any American poet since Walt Whitman himself has written elegies this consistently magnificent.”

Tim O’Brien: In the Lake of the Woods (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence), a novel about a Minnesota politician who searches for his missing wife and confronts long-suppressed memories of My Lai.

Charles Simic: The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs (Univ. of Michigan), a collection of memoirs, essays, and journal entries that illuminate the origins of Simic’s poetry.

Maura Stanton: Life Among the Trolls (David R. Godine), a poetry collection that explores themes of love and hate.

Richard Tillinghast: The Stonecutter’s Hand (Godine), a collection of poems that extols the virtues and pleasures of travel.

Tobias Wolff: In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (Knopf), a memoir of Wolff’s Vietnam years.