Nonfiction

Dana Gibson has the real gift, an ability to see and to think and to write in a way that is truly unique and original. Her prose makes even the most ordinary of events take on an almost edenic clarity and freshness. Sometimes her language seems Nabokovian to me in its lilt and life, and…

Susan Straight's prose is as innocent and hard as the lives of the people she loves. It is this love for her characters-unidealized, tangible, as deep as time-that makes her story so extraordinary. Little of moment happens: A woman lies next to her man at dawn and thinks about his back, yet in the evocation…

Deborah Joy Corey's narrators take control as soon as they get behind the wheel of her stories. They pull you into their pickup trucks, or vintage white Cadillacs, or baby blue DeSotos and slam the door. And there you are looking at their world through cracked and dusty windshields, living their lives, drivin' the Vitamin…

With gratitude I recommend to readers this story written by a writer who was a young man in the sixties in America, and who survived the colliding hopes and promises, and the shattering of so many of them, the shattering even of the very sources of so many of them, during that time in our…

Amanda Pierson has a good eye, a fine ear, and a wanderer's heart. Born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey, Amanda traveled south following her graduation from Dartmouth College, and it is there-in the climate of Porter and Faulkner-that she began to discover her voice as a writer. Much has been made of the verbal…

I met Noy Holland six years ago at a writers' conference at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where Barry Hannah wild man stories were still rife, though he had been gone from there a couple of years. The title of the conference was Voicelust, and Tuscaloosa, lush with boredom, marital breakup, dog racing, the…

I • THE VAST SLEEP OF THINGS 1 Carthage Is Burning If only this sleep could be wind, I told myself, a dark stirring of it out of Egypt, the wind which rots all sails and cannot rot and is beyond age-not the scirocco with its one obsession; not the chinook thawing the ice on…

Craig Raine's new kind of poetry has yet to reach a substantial audience in the United States. But, if the reviews can be believed, Raine's reputation in Britain exceeds that of any contemporary poet on this side of the Atlantic. Raine's four books- The Onion, Memory, A Martian Sends a Post Card Home, Rich, and…

I discovered Craig Raine's work (first his remarkable second book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and then his first book The Onion, Memory) about eight years ago. I was immediately struck by its eloquence, which is never stuffy or merely decorative, by the sharpness of its tone, and by the odd rightness of its…