Editor's Shelf

Dan Wakefield recommends My Misspent Youth, essays by Meghan Daum: “A first book of Didion-like essays on contemporary life, with wit and insight and graceful prose.” (Open City)

George Garrett recommends The Land Between, a novel by Cathryn Hankla: “Hankla’s second novel (and her ninth title) is coming out almost simultaneously with her latest book of poems, Poems for the Pardoned, from LSU. She writes as well as anybody alive about the earth and the environment. It’s a well-plotted, strong story, alive with…

Frank Bidart recommends Notes from the Divided Country, poems by Suji Kwock Kim: "This is a brilliant, unerasable book, one of the most remarkable debuts I’ve ever read. It begins with the descent of the soul into flesh, which is also the descent into the catastrophic, tormenting history of family and nation. The poems as…

George Garrett recommends Do I Owe You Something, a memoir by Michael Mewshaw: “Novelist and nonfiction writer Mewshaw here offers a focused memoir concerning writers he has known well over many years. At the still point where memory and gossip become history, he gives us candid and surprising portraits of giants and pygmies of the…

Jane Hirshfield recommends Ripe, poems by Roy Jacobstein: "Roy Jacobstein’s Ripe, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize, is a book of balance, precision, vision, courage, and wit. Each poem feels solidly present in what it knows, each poem is fragrant with lived life—just as its title implies, here is a poet come into his ripeness."…

George Garrett recommends A Word in Your Ear, poems by Monroe Spears: “The late Monroe Spears (1916-1998) was one of the major critics and editors (The Sewanee Review) of our time. That he also wrote first-rate poetry was sometimes overlooked. As Daniel Hoffman has written about this volume: ‘Those who know Monroe Spears through his…

DeWitt Henry recommends A Tragic Honesty, a biography by Blake Bailey: “Richard Yates comes fully alive as an artist and as a man in this meticulously researched, judicious, and critically perceptive biography. Blake Bailey has done for Yates what Carlos Baker did for Hemingway, allowing Yates himself to speak from letters, archives, reported conversations, and…

Philip Levine recommends Fire, poems by Wesley McNair: “Is there any poet around who can catch the singular qualities of American voices better than Wesley McNair? If so, I haven’t found her. In this, his fifth book of poetry-and for me his most beautiful and moving-he reunites a dismal collection of people (what we call…

C. D. Wright recommends Alphabet, poetry by Inger Christensen: “A brilliant abecedary by Danish writer Inger Christensen which sets forth our feckless pressure on the earth’s futurity in a comely ancient form.” (New Directions)