Editor's Corner

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)

Charles Simic, Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt, poems, with drawings by Howie Michaels: A playful salute to all things sexy in erotic poems and illustrations. (Tin House/Bloomsbury)

Gary Soto, Help Wanted, stories: A witty collection of ten young-adult stories about Latino youth in trouble, or looking for trouble, in the weirdness of everyday Fresno. (Harcourt)

Gerald Stern, Everything Is Burning, poems: Ruthless and occasionally outrageous, Stern’s literary songs are sharp, surprising, and unerring in their delivery. (Norton)

Ann Beattie, Follies, stories: In nine scintillating stories and a novella, Beattie—with her keen, morbid wit—looks at baby boomers, aging parents, and the chance encounters that irrevocably alter lives. (Scribner)

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)

Stratis Haviaras, translation of The Canon, poems by C. P. Cavafy: Haviaras’s marvelous new translations of the one hundred fifty-four poems Cavafy published during his lifetime resonate, as Seamus Heaney says in his introduction, with “the abundance and excitement of . . . restoration.” (Hermes)

Christopher Tilghman, Roads of the Heart, a novel: In Tilghman’s generous and powerful novel, a man and his father—a former Maryland senator—journey on the road and discover the resilient truths of their family. (Random)