Editor's Shelf

Mary Gordon recommends Ideas of Heaven, stories by Joan Silber: "This original, finely wrought collection deals with spiritual issues, always with a combination of grace and lightness." (Norton)

Philip Levine recommends What I Can’t Bear Losing, a memoir by Gerald Stern: “This book would have been more accurately titled What I Can’t Lose, since it is made up of a series of essays that deal with the images and events that have haunted Stern all his life. As in his poems, Stern is…

Maxine Kumin recommends The House on Eccles Road, a first novel by Judith Kitchen: “A day in the lives of Molly and Leo Bluhm in Dublin, Ohio, June 16, 1999, mirroring Joyce’s Bloomsday, artfully layered with outer calm and inner disarray.” (Penguin)

Thomas Lux recommends Old Bright Wheel, poems by Robert Fanning: “A first volume by a young poet of great emotional depth, skill, and imaginative energy.” (Ledge)

Rosellen Brown recommends There Is Room for You, a novel by Charlotte Bacon: “A two-generation novel in which a British mother’s childhood in India is not only fascinating for the reader but illuminating for her very American daughter.” (FSG)

George Garrett recommends The Stories of Richard Bausch, a collection by Richard Bausch: “The sixth collection (and fourteenth book) by one of the finest living masters of the short story. Forty-one stories, old and new, to relish and rejoice in, to learn from.” (HarperCollins)

DeWitt Henry recommends Man vs. Nature, a novel by Doug Crandell: “In his debut novel, Crandell tells a lyrical, preposterous tale of Midwestern farm life, interweaving the coming of age of a farm boy with a lunatic father who raises pigs and a subplot about the invasion of TV news and the media’s distortions of…

Margot Livesey recommends Broken Ground, a novel by Kai Maristed: “Maristed brilliantly depicts a woman’s search for her daughter and her past in Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel moves gracefully between past and present, personal and political, and is intelligent, absorbing, and suspenseful at every level.” (Shoemaker &…

Gerald Stern recommends Search Party, collected poems of William Matthews: “For my money, the new selected of Bill Matthews is a bit too thin considering his extraordinary vision and voice, but it is a magnificent book that the editors Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly have brought out. I think Matthews will take his place as…