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)

   Philip Levine recommends The Trust, nonfiction by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones: “A complex and fascinating story of the Ochs-Sulzberger families, owners of The New York Times, beginning with the amazing Adolph Ochs, an American success story to rival Gatsby’s, and ending yesterday with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., in command of the dynasty….

Charles Simic recommends The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson (Field Poetry Series): “If you wish to know what the prose poem can do, read Edson. He is one of the most original poets we have, widely translated and almost unknown at home.”

Joyce Peseroff recommends The Waters of Forgetting, a poetry collection by Barry Seiler (Univ. of Akron): “Seiler brings together poems that spring from the tensions between memory and forgetting, past and present, the daily and the eternal. He connects public moments with personal history in lyrics that are bittersweet and fresh.”

Marilyn Hacker recommends The Woman Behind You, poems by Julie Fay: “Julie Fay’s The Woman Behind You is at once a superb manifestation of the contemporary possibilities of lyric poetry and a sustained and gripping narrative of a late-twentieth-century woman’s life, exemplary in its specificities, picaresque in the geographic and erotic vicissitudes of its quest….

Philip Levine recommends Things that Happen Once, poems by Rodney Jones: “Rodney Jones is a new and long overdue discovery of mine. With wit, charm, and great resourcefulness, he writes wonderfully uncluttered poems that pay tribute to a rich cast of characters, from Aunt Madge to Melody, ‘the teenage welfare mother down the hall.’ His…

Gail Mazur recommends Two Cities, essays by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): “Zagajewski’s a fine poet, one of the best, and this second collection of prose pieces-memoir/essays/prose poems-is the mature work of an ecstatic ironist: cosmopolitan, sweet, philosophical, and revealing. Born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945, Zagajewski is the voice of his generation, everywhere…