Editor's Shelf

Andre Dubus recommends Moving Violations, a memoir by John Hockenberry (Hyperion): “You don’t have to be in a wheelchair to love this book, which reaches a conclusion about the U.S. that I’ve never read before.”

Ann Beattie recommends Reader’s Block, a novel by David Markson: “Finally: a fictional sequel to Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’ Markson’s novel advances by allusion and cumulative effect, like a big snowball going downhill (and it’s impossible to read without realizing that the twentieth century has gone the same way). This is really a work of genius:…

Maura Stanton recommends My Shining Archipelago, poems by Taluikki Ansel: “Ansel’s poems are surprising and imaginative, filled with fresh insight into the natural world. Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.” (Yale)

Philip Levine recommends Reign of Snakes, poems by Robert Wrigley: “Robert Wrigley has been a fine poet through four previous books; his last, In the Bank of the Beautiful Sins, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. In this new book he has become someone else, someone who has wandered into a ferocious cave…

Marilyn Hacker recommends Naming the Light: A Week of Years, essays by Rosemary Deen: “These essays mostly begin with the natural world near at hand: the author’s rambling garden in Ulster County, New York. But they range and reach out the way a brilliantly polymath mind does: to Florentine painting, American rural architecture, medieval polyphony,…

DeWitt Henry recommends Richard Yates, criticism by David Castronovo and Steven Goldleaf: “As part of Twayne’s United States Authors Series, this book is a provocative, helpful, and well-informed reading of Yates’s work as a canon, related to his biography, the work of his contemporaries, and to the intellectual character of our times and culture. Provides…

George Garrett recommends Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure, a textbook by Madison Smartt Bell: “A remarkable textbook with an unusual point of view, in which the structural design is primary in the writing of fiction. With excellent examples and analyses.” (Norton)

Christopher Tilghman recommends Safe in America, a novel by Marcie Hershman (HarperCollins): “Marcie Hershman has interwoven a family saga with the triple threats of the Holocaust, war, and AIDS. She presents these calamities as family tragedies, revealed in the heartbreaking ordinariness of daily life. Her story, with its ironic title, should make everyone consider his…

Philip Levine recommends New Addresses, poems by Kenneth Koch: “Koch at his best. He addresses what has given his life meaning: sex, love, war service, languages, business, the central and the trivial. Funny poems? Yes. And wonderfully serious.” (Knopf)