Editor's Shelf

James Alan McPherson recommends Who’s Irish? by Gish Jen: “Very funny stories about domesticity.” (Knopf)

M. L. Rosenthal recommends Winter Channels, poems by James Schevill (Floating Island): “A rare collection of brief lyric pieces, full of gentle feeling, humane wisdom, and sharp political and social thrusts, by one of America’s most serious-and seriously neglected-poets.”

Andre Dubus recommends Women in Their Beds, stories by Gina Berriault: “For decades Gina Berriault has been a hidden treasure. Now we have thirty-five of her stories in one book. Buy it, and don’t lend it to anyone. Her work keeps going out of print.” (Counterpoint)

DeWitt Henry recommends ZYZZYVA: The Corporate Autobiography (Fall/ Winter 2000 issue) by Howard Junker: “The autobiography of Junker as a studied original, and the creation of his literary magazine, ZYZZYVA, as a kind of performance art-at once his chosen business in the world, and his imaginative fulfillment in spite of the world. There is the…

Don Lee recommends Zip Six, a first novel by Jack Gantos: “Dark, energetic, and sometimes surprisingly comic, Gantos’s novel charts a young drug smuggler’s course through prison.” (Bridge Works)

   Jane Hirshfield recommends fine, poems by Stefanie Marlis: ” fine consists for the most part of brief ‘definitions’-poems that slip from actual definition into etymology into image, association, story, pondering. These elliptical prose poems liberate the relationship between the poet’s life and imagination in surprising, precise ways, like tiny explosive charges set down in…

Sherman Alexie recommends One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, nonfiction by Scott L. Malcomson: “This book inspired me and pissed me off. I threw it across the room in anger a few times because I disagreed so strongly with Malcomson; I also shook my head with wonder when he was so right….

Rosellen Brown recommends Inspired Sleep, a novel by Robert Cohen: “This novel, more gently than DeLillo’s White Noise, and with a wicked wit, takes an appalled look at Americans’ current work-weary, sleep-deprived, multitasking-unsatisfactory-lives and shows why it’s no wonder so many reach for the anodyne of pills. Sympathetic to some and hell on others, this…

Madeline DeFrees recommends I Want This World, poems by Margaret Szumowsky: “Margaret Szumowsky’s poems embody a global consciousness. In her first full-length collection, she reveals a lively energy, a sharp eye for the triumphs and the foibles of the human condition, and a wide-ranging empathy. These are poems the reader will return to again and…