Rosellen Brown recommends The Stone Diaries, a novel by Carol Shields (Viking): “A marvelously written, poignant, and funny chronicle of a Canadian woman’s life. This has the wit and authority of a nineteenth-century novel with a knowing contemporary slyness to it.”
Madeline DeFrees recommends The Tiger Iris, poems by Joan Swift: “Of all the writers I know, Joan Swift is surely one of the best at transforming reverses into poems of astonishing beauty and strength. Her particular blend of memory, imagination, feeling, and intellect creates an alchemy that changes the base metal of experience into gold.”…
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…
Rosellen Brown recommends Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy, a memoir by Frances Mayes: “Frances Mayes’s beautifully written account of her love affair with a house she and her husband renovated in Tuscany, and with a place that retains ancient standards for all things sensual, contains an essay that appeared in my personal…
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