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…
Chase Twichell recommends Dark Under Kiganda Stars, poems by Lilah Hegnauer: “This first book is a startling lyrical account of a young Catholic American student’s time in Uganda, where she taught English in the Kiganda Highway Secondary School and assisted at a medical clinic in a remote country village. She was given several classes of…
Ellen Bryant Voigt recommends In the Blue Pharmacy, essays by Marianne Boruch: “The same capacious mind on display in Boruch’s selected poems is everywhere available here, as is her characteristic meditative structure, one that circles its subjects and their implications without any sort of didactic overreaching. In ‘The Rage to Reorder,’ the last piece in…
Dan Wakefield recommends The Writing on the Wall, a novel by Lynn Sharon Schwartz: "The Writing on the Wall is a novel that mines art and understanding out of the 9/11 nightmare, bringing the effects of the tragedy into individual lives of credible characters. The author’s earlier masterwork, Disturbances in the Field, which follows the…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Cain’s Daughters, poems by Phyllis Collier: “From the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to the labor camps of California, Collier follows the migration and celebrates the hard lives of pioneering women. Cain’s Daughters is a singular example of the way art transcends and transforms the world of fact.” (Blue Unicorn)
Philip Levine recommends Nobody’s Baby, stories by Leo Litwak: “Leo Litwak, the author of the finest memoir of WWII combat I have read by an American, The Medic, again demonstrates his superb gift for narrative in this astonishing collection of short stories, Nobody’s Baby. His insights into the complex motives of human behavior and the…
Margot Livesey recommends Tenney’s Landing, stories by Catherine Tudish: “I don’t know quite how Catherine Tudish does it, but somehow in this remarkable collection of linked stories she evokes the people and places of Tenney’s Landing so vividly and completely that every reader will surely want to take up residence in this small Pennsylvania river…
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