Editor's Shelf

Maxine Kumin recommends Old Mother, Little Cat: A Writer’s Reflections on Her Kitten, Her Aged Mother, and . . . Life, a memoir by Merrill Joan Gerber: “This is a deeply affecting book, told absolutely without artifice; unflinching but compassionate, and very charming. Gerber is best known as a novelist and short story writer. She…

George Garrett recommends Omniphobia, fiction by R. H. W. Dillard (Louisiana State): “Four stories and three novellas by a master of American metafiction. A virtuoso demonstration of the virtues of the avant-garde.”

Gail Mazur recommends Open Water, a novel by Maria Flook (Pantheon): “Maria Flook’s people in Open Water are the product of her full-hearted embrace of an American kind of nuttiness and a zest for their strange self-induced troubles. The margin, which is their habitat, is wildly, deliciously drawn by a writer of enormous intelligence and…

James Alan McPherson recommends Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine, a memoir by Peter Canning: “Peter Canning is a former student from both Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His book is an excellently written account of the lifesaving roles played by paramedics in an increasingly dangerous world. I might add that Peter is…

Maura Stanton recommends Pears, Lake, Sun, a first book of poems by Sandy Solomon: “Sandy Solomon is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The poems in Pears, Lake, Sun are tough-minded and impeccably crafted, full of passionate stillness and disciplined commotion.” (Pittsburgh)

Gary Soto recommends Limbo, a novel by Dixie Salazar (White Pine): “Dixie Salazar is the Kaye Gibbons of Fresno, California. Wealth of detail, attitude, and a sorrowful story.”

Maura Stanton recommends Liver, poems by Charles Harper Webb: ” Liver, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, is a book you can read cover to cover with astonishing delight. The poems are witty, imaginative, stylistically sophisticated, and completely accurate about life on a planet crowded with billions of others like you. Buy this…

Fanny Howe recommends I Love Dick, a first novel by Chris Kraus: “A highly charged description of an obsession with an indifferent man named Dick, this unfolds as a brilliant intertextual document-feminist and contemporary in all its anxieties and passions. Important!” (Semiotexte)

Don Lee recommends Living to Be 100, stories by Robert Boswell (HarperPerennial): “A richly imaginative, truly wonderful collection of short stories. Where other writers would stop, Boswell always goes one unexpected, delightful step further.”