Editor's Corner

Russell Banks, The Darling, a novel: Set in Liberia, Banks’s riveting new book explores the interrelated history of race problems in the U.S. and Africa. (HarperCollins)

James Carroll, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, essays: Carroll collects his searing, passionate Boston Globe columns about the Bush administration’s "coercive unilateralism." (Holt)

Stuart Dybek, Streets in Their Own Ink, poems: In his second poetry collection, Dybek finds extraordinary vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated fiction. (FSG)

George Garrett, Double Vision, a novel: As expected from Garrett, this novel is a witty tour de force, marrying fact and fiction about a gifted generation of American writers. (Alabama)  

Gish Jen, The Love Wife, a novel: Jen, in her most exuberant and accomplished book, provides a brilliant portrait of a new "half-half" American family. (Knopf)

Donald Hall, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, essays: Hall collects forty years of writings on poetry into a luminous and essential volume about the sensuality of language, its pleasures and sounds. (Michigan)

Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress, essays: In these richly evocative and provocative pieces, Howe meditates on imagination, motherhood, art-making, and bewilderment, challenging conventional systems of belief. (California)

Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place, poems: Lux asks questions about language and intention and about connections to nature in fifty-two new poems, bringing to delightful life the “refreshing iconoclasms” that Rita Dove has admired in his work. (Houghton Mifflin)

Fanny Howe, Gone, poems: With verve and clarity, Howe illuminates the interstices between the known and unknown worlds with motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction, in her extraordinary new book. (California)