Editor's Corner

Rita Dove, American Smooth, poems: In her eighth superb collection, Dove pays homage to the grit and mother wit that inform our mongrel cultural heritage. (Norton)

Madison Smartt Bell, The Stone That the Builder Refused, a novel: Bell gives us the final, climactic novel in his glorious trilogy about Toussaint Louverture. (Pantheon)

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)

Gary Soto, One Kind of Faith, poems: Soto once again displays dazzling range in his twenty-sixth book, exploring the wonders of the everyday in poems about Berkeley and Fresno, along with a nervy section of “film treatments for David Lynch.” (Chronicle)

Maura Stanton, Cities in the Sea, stories: Blurring the boundaries between fairy tale and vérité, Stanton incisively taps into the mysteries of contemporary life in these magical new stories, examining the nature of narrative and dreams. (Michigan)

Gerald Stern, What I Can’t Bear Losing, essays: Tenderly touching upon a number of events, from Sundays spent in Calvinist Pittsburgh to being shot in Newark, Stern provides magnificent lessons on the awakening of an artistic consciousness. (Norton)

Tobias Wolff, Old School, a novel: A scholarship student at a New England prep school vies for a literary prize in Wolff’s marvelous first novel, and the boy ends up being seduced by the irresistible power of self-creation. (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)