Joyce Peseroff recommends Letters to Jane, correspondence by Hayden Carruth: "While researching Jane Kenyon’s papers archived at the UNH library, I came across a file of letters written to her by Hayden Carruth during the long months of her illness. Carruth didn’t expect a reply; he didn’t write to be cheery or tell her to…
Robert Pinsky recommends Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, a biography by Stephen Greenblatt: "To recommend a best-seller? Strange in a way, but Ploughshares readers should know that Greenblatt is a real writer. Unlike many a ‘noted scholar’ he writes wonderful sentences and paragraphs. Here is a book about a literary writer that…
Maxine Kumin recommends This Smoke that Carried Us, poems by René Char, translated by Susanne Dubroff: “This volume of selected poems, with a sensitive and informative introduction by Christopher Merrill, is an essential document of World War II. Many of these poems were written while parachutists were dropping behind enemy lines, but the subject matter,…
C. D. Wright recommends Altazor, poetry by Vincente Huidrobro, translated by Eliot Weinberger: “A book-length poem from the twenties that continues to set the mind on fire. An exhilarating tribute to the future, which is perhaps the only place it is reasonable to aspire since the present is nonetheless interesting but a deadly spot in…
DeWitt Henry recommends When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother, nonfiction by Thomas J. Cottle: “Cottle’s memoir of his mother, Gitta Gradova, a prominent concert pianist, is first a biography that evokes her career, performances, and friendships with such greats as Rachmaninoff, Toscanini, Heifetz, and Horowitz, giving us a cross section of classical music’s inner…
Philip Levine recommends The Ha-Ha, poems by David Kirby: “David Kirby has been writing very original and moving poems for at least twenty years, but this new book is his most daring and successful. The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like…
Margot Livesey recommends Heaven Lake, a novel by John Dalton: “In this immaculately written first novel, Dalton follows a young American, Vincent, who goes to Taiwan as a Christian missionary and ends up making an epic journey to mainland China. Heaven Lake is large in scope, vivid in character, and beautifully plotted.” (Scribner)
Margot Livesey recommends Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, nonfiction by Peter Turchi: "I love the layering of imagery and information that Peter Turchi accomplishes as Maps of the Imagination unfolds. The illustrations throughout are wonderful—so surprising and various and interesting. My brain felt enlarged by reading this account of so many different…
George Garrett recommends The Stone That the Builder Refused, a novel by Madison Smartt Bell: "The magnificent final volume of Bell’s Haitian trilogy about the only successful slave revolution in history. Epic in scope, yet grounded and richly detailed, this huge work is a masterpiece." (Pantheon)
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