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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…
Peter Ho Davies recommends Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert: “A rust belt epic by a writer of distinctive vision. More than a dozen years in the making—I saw the earliest iterations in workshop and have never forgotten them—it’s been worth the wait.” Jane Hirshfield recommends Practicing the Truth, by Ellery Akers: “Practicing the Truth…
Book Recommendations from Our Advisory Editors Ann Beattie recommends Salt and Pepper Cooking, The Education of an American Chef, by James Haller: “This slim book contains tons of information about coming of age, how one develops, and what part fate, friendship, and luck play in an individual’s life. As well as being humane and downright…
Neil Astley recommends Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist by Kirun Kapur: “Kirun Kapur has taken many years to produce a first collection which is so assured and lyrically compelling that it reads nothing like a debut volume. Her poems draw on family history, myth, and people’s stories to dramatize how the past informs the present, and…
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