Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Rosellen Brown recommends Tamed & Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017). This is a collection of brief essays by two of this country’s most daring and profound students of animal behavior. They have had seemingly endless experience with just about every kind of living thing from infinitesimal “water bears” to puffins and hyraxes (with special attention to dogs, closer to home) and their witty and heartfelt defense of animals’ intelligence and emotional lives shows mere humans to be dangerously uninformed and, often, unwittingly cruel for how we (do not) relate to them in all their complexity.

Peter Ho Davies recommends Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li (Henry Holt and Co., June 2018), a workplace novel notable for its vivid, insider acuity. Li renders her bustling, hustling clan of waiters, hostesses, cooks, and managers with brilliant feeling.

Peter Ho Davies recommends Back Talk: Stories by Danielle Lazarin (Penguin Books, 2018), a kaleidoscopic portrait of the contemporary family in a state of creative destruction.

Tess Gallagher recommends Hunger by Alice Derry (Moonpath Press, 2018). The book explores many dimensions of our desires and unanswered needs. Emotional hunger, psychic hunger, bodily hunger—met in political terms and personal. Her range is sweeping and gathers one up from the familial to identification with those seeking shelter in crisis around the world.