Tess Gallagher recommends Poems of Repossession: Leabhar na hAthghabhála edited by Louis De Paor, Irish-English Bilingual Edition (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). “This book of Irish poems in translation carries some very strong poems, [including] one by Seán Ó Ríordáin called ‘Switch,’ which is the central mandate for empathy—a poet’s main tool. Also, one may read what…
Lauren Groff recommends Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (Counterpoint, 2018). “I’ve been haunted by this talented writer’s first memoir since I read it a month ago. It is knife-sharp and beautifully strange and so full of both kinds of madness that the madness seems to leak through the text and into the reader.” …
Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors Ann Beattie recommends Movie Stars by Jack Pendarvis (Dzanc Books, 2016). “The humor, and the (forgive me) world view in these stories makes me think of Robert Plunket. No one else would conclude a story with the dog looking out the window, ‘white forepaws on the window ledge,…
Rosellen Brown recommends Tamed & Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017). This is a collection of brief essays by two of this country’s most daring and profound students of animal behavior. They have had seemingly endless experience with just about every kind of…
Ann Beattie recommends After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Search by Sarah Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). “It’s the story of a murder, but it’s an amazing account of class in America, of life on the fringe of a fabric we now see fraying more every day. It’s beautifully written and I’m amazed that…
Lauren Groff recommends Transit by Rachel Cusk: “Transit is the second in a projected three-book series of strange and elegant anti-novels from the radically undersung British writer Rachel Cusk. Most novels spark urgency with plot, but Transit’s urgency comes, instead, from the voices of the people the narrator spends her life listening carefully to. The…
Jane Hirshfield recommends World of Made and Unmade by Jane Mead (Alice James Books, September 2016): “This is a work of enormous reach and dignity. The collection’s center is Mead’s mother’s death, though naming its subject doesn’t begin to convey the power of Mead’s writing, or of her multifaceted looking and feeling. The land, with…
Nick Flynn recommends Likenesses by Heather Tone (American Poetry Review, 2016): “Strap yourself into this book, allow yourself to ride it all the way to the top—remember (as Tone writes), ‘At a certain point it would be wise to ask yourself why you are doing this.’” Jane Hirshfield recommends May Day by Gretchen Marquette (Graywolf,…
Ann Beattie recommends Forty Martyrs by Philip F. Deaver: “These are grown-up stories about grown-ups. Subtly linked and beautifully written, their subject is loss (and possible redemption), played against a backdrop of Everywhere, America, that, in his hands, isn’t.” Robert Boswell recommends Calle Florista by Connie Voisine: “This is a remarkable book by one of…
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