Editor's Shelf

C. D. Wright recommends Alphabet, poems by Inger Christensen: “A book to break up the psychic mumbo jumbo within, and to help you fight the actual threats from without. A true singer of the syllables.” (New Directions)

Maxine Kumin recommends Now the Green Blade Rises, poems by Elizabeth Spires: “A book remarkable for its grace, its willingness to grapple with large metaphysical issues in modest and physical terms, and an eloquence that is an unusual commodity in most contemporary collections.” (Norton)

James Alan McPherson recommends The Wide-Brimmed Hat, a collection by Susan Kuehn Boyd: “This beautiful collection of stories, memories, and poems captures the sensibility of a very special writer. Ms. Boyd’s stories began appearing in The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories as early as 1947. Set in regions as far apart…

Margot Livesey recommends Secret Frequencies: A New York Education, a memoir by John Skoyles: "No one who reads this delightful, absorbing account of a teenage boy’s summer of initiation will ever forget the brilliant characters or the remarkable city—New York in the sixties—which John Skoyles brings so eloquently to life." (Nebraska)

David Gullette recommends Misery Prefigured, poems by J. Allyn Rosser: “The voice in Rosser’s second book is sassy and self-assured: ‘To say screw them, to be screw-them / bent on one thing all but lost, / one music or mystery, / beyond all the necessary / incidental snaggings of the heart.’ In ‘Prell’ a man…

DeWitt Henry recommends Ladies of the Borobudur, stories by Barbara Haines Howett: “Although Howett’s stories portray a variety of characters, the primary focus is on corporate wives in Indonesia and their troubled awareness of social injustice and of the richness of cultural differences. Howett explores and evokes astonishingly different points of view, and her post-colonial…

Maxine Kumin recommends When Men Were the Only Models We Had, a memoir by Carolyn G. Heilbrun: “A study of the influences of Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun on Heilbrun’s own literary development, but the book is far broader than that-really, a history of Columbia University in the turmoil of the sixties and…

Philip Levine recommends I Thought My Father Was God, true tales edited by Paul Auster: “Paul Auster has chosen one hundred eighty of the thousands of true tales submitted to NPR’s National Story Project and divided them into eight categories (animals, objects, war, love, etc.) and introduced them with sympathy and verve. The power, wit,…

James Alan McPherson recommends The Huntsman, a novel by Whitney Terrell: “This is an excellent exploration of racial and class interactions in contemporary American life. But much more than this, Whitney provides the reader with a knowing view of Kansas City-a sense of place that is evocative of a settled way of life. This book…