“Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified a
“[Baron] Wormser is a beautiful writer of the meditative-narrative poem in the compassionate and lucid style of Frost, Hayden Carruth, and Donald Hall. Like those writers, his poems dignify rural live
“He brings something ancient and compelling . . . a kind of rare Sephardic wisdom, a brilliance traveling at the speed of Los Angeles light. He is one of America’s very best poets. A true visionary.”—
In her introduction to The Man Back There, Mary Gaitskill writes simply, “I chose these stories because they made me feel. . . .” The reader of David Crouse’s collection is bound to agree, but the rea
Judith Slater's debut collection, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, was selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories i
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units
In Three Poets of Modern Korea, American poet James Kimbrell, and translator and native speaker Yu Jung-yul, have gathered and translated leading representatives of three generations of Korean poets.
This collection leaps into the dangerous currents where poetry and reli-gion meet, and enlivens the lexicon of traditional American Christian belief by testing its doctrines and language against conte
Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my r
Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating i
"Fridlund writes of families, marriage, and childhood as if our received wisdomwhat we thought we knew about life and love and familyneeds reparation. This is fiction as excavation, peelin
“From the world that could not be saved, the storyteller salvages small, strange stuff and assembles it into a narrative of alarming beauty and mystery and sadness.”—from the introduction by Carole Ma
Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and co
“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier“In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least t
"Muench's lush figures give great pleasure to both ear and eye, and her imaginative leaps can feel both mysterious and inevitable, in a way that recalls not only Desnos, but also Neruda."—The New York
"These [stories] are rust-belt blues, then, a vision of and lament for a past time and a swiftly changing place. They're not showy?the language is plain, the tragedy muted, the comedy low-key and wry?
Collects eleven short stories depicting rural Kentucky and an array of tormented and battered souls, including a groom that punches his bride on their wedding day.
“These are ambitious, moving poems, deft, panged, and stunning.”—Dean Young“Existential chilliness, mourning, and dread find a uniquely compelling voice in Thomas Heise's poetry. . . .”—Alan Williamso
“Kinesthetic, compassionate, unflinching, sometimes narrative, sometimes surreal, C. E. Perry’s poems turn this world’s full ripeness and strangeness as a farmer turns soil—that out of disruption and
Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices, and radio schematics, Ander Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves, and electricity are
A unique collection that revisits Dante's classic with translations by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and full-color artwork by internationally renowned artist Michael Mazur. This rare and stunni
A meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman's exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous Boston museum radiates out from its subject to investigate Gardner's legacy of history and wi
"Eleanor Lerman's poems have sociological savvy, philosophical rue, historical recognition, and vernacular resilience. They sing a song that is bravely gloomy, but they sing it with a fierce and earne
"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The
Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored af
Sandra Cisneros has a fondness for animals and this little gem of a story makes that abundantly clear. “La casa azul,” the cobalt blue residence of Mister and Missus Rivera, overflows with hairless do
The Available World is strikingly original and often exhilarating. This is a refreshing and knowledgeable voice that drew me into listening carefully. There are only a few books of poems a year that e
“Her poems make vivid what has become dusty, and return us to, as real art does, the brilliance of initial perception.”—Jane Hirshfield“The mythmaking in these poems is fierce and wildly original—this
Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods begins with a speaker invoking her dead father, and unfolds as a kind of mystery novel. Spanning decades, and set on a decrepit, inherited farm in Pennsylvania,
Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and
Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkhard's seventh collection of poetry and his first book since W.W. Norton published My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems) in 1990. He has received a Whiting Write
"What Louisa Ermelino knows about the heart could fill a book and has. The unadorned authenticity of her prose is so powerful, it gave me whiplash. I readMalafemmena in one sitting and wanted mor
"Lucy / your secret book / that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt - / Not having to have an ending / Not having to last"... and so begins Jean Valentine's provocative new work, Lucy, a poem
The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 Anniversary of The Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace
“Poema del cante jondo and Romancero Gitano, the books of poems that Lorca wrote first, out of his excited response to gypsy music, poetry, and dance all around him in Granada, contain some of his mos
“Keep watching for Yolanda Barnes and her work. Her voice is her own and will be heard.”—George GarrettInspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, When It Burned to the Ground is an impressionistic vis
A pantoum about a child touching the smallpox-scarred face of an aunt; a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate in the form of a nursery rhyme; Joseph and Mary sleeping on the Sphinx's stone paw: these are
