Editor's Corner

Frank Bidart, Star Dust, poems: Finishing the sequence that began with his chapbook Music Like Dirt, Bidart illustrates with unforgettable passion that the dream beyond desire is rooted in the drive to create. (FSG)

Donald Hall, The Best Day the Worst Day, a memoir: This beautiful book’s account of Hall’s life with his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, is joyful, intimate, heartbreaking, and generous. (Houghton Mifflin)

Joyce Peseroff, Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, essays: Peseroff gathers personal and critical essays, letters, poems, and memoirs that piercingly celebrate Kenyon’s spirit and charm. (Graywolf)

Mary Gordon, Pearl, a novel: In Gordon’s haunting new book, a woman reexamines her assumptions about politics and the church when she goes to Dublin to save her daughter, who is on a hunger strike. (Pantheon)

Marilyn Hacker, translation of Birds and Bison, poems by Claire Malroux: These are both urban and pastoral poems, marvelously observing the natural world, language, and the human spirit. (Sheep Meadow)

Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen, a novel: In this enthralling tale, a small-town librarian is hit by lightning, and finds her heretofore frozen heart suddenly burning. (Little, Brown)

Maxine Kumin, Jack and Other New Poems: Kumin’s powerful fourteenth collection contains her signature pastoral poems, but also meditations on the body, war, civil liberties, and the environment. (Norton)

Jay Neugeboren, News from the New American Diaspora, stories: The twelve stories in Neugeboren’s illuminating new collection focus on Jews in various states of exile—strangers in strange lands, far from home. (Texas)

Howard Norman, In Fond Remembrance of Me, a memoir: A moving memoir of Norman’s time in Manitoba, where he and an Anglo-Japanese woman—fatally ill, but an ardent spirit—were translating Inuit tales. (North Point)