Editor's Corner

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)

Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage, poems: With his usual wry acuity, Simic explores love, futility, and the sense of an individual life in his fourteenth volume. (Harcourt)

Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated, poems: Williamson’s verse from the last three decades are collected with new poems that beautifully draw his oeuvre together. (Chicago)

Mark Doty, School of the Arts, poems: Incisive and transcendent, Doty’s seventh collection contemplates the creative process and eternal questions of love and loss, desire and despair. (HarperCollins)