Robert Boswell recommends Leaving Disneyland, a novel by Alexander Parsons: ” Leaving Disneyland is a powerful and wide-ranging story of betrayal, violence, and regret. The book is brutally honest, unsparing, and written with amazing authority. The piercing sadness of Doc Kane is so beautifully rendered that the reader comes to see it as something more-a…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Facing the Facts, poems by Laurie Blauner: “Laurie Blauner’s fourth collection includes fifty-seven poems, ranging from largely tranquil domestic scenes to the stark contrast of the final section, in which she explores the characters and situations of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s horror tale seems eerily relevant to the marvels and terrors of twenty-first-century…
George Garrett recommends Sallies, poems by R.H.W. Dillard: “Dillard’s latest and sixth collection of poems-rich and wise.” (LSU)
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…
Gary Soto recommends Rumba Atop the Stones, poems by Orlando Ricardo Menes: “There is lush music to Menes’s first book, and this lushness may arise from his subject, namely the Caribbean islands, particularly Cuba, his parents’ homeland. He writes of its populace-the dock worker, the sugar cane worker, the worker slaving at all trades-and the…
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