Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Peter Ho Davies recommends Likes by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (Macmillan, 2020). “Several pieces in this collection of sly, wise stories—two of which originally appeared in Ploughshares—spring from myth and fairytale, but the abiding magic here lies in the luminous reality of the characters.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W. W. Norton, 2021). “A memorable short story from Quade’s debut collection has swelled into a resonant novel of family and community. A transcendent book about the failure to transcend ourselves, also known as the human condition.”

DeWitt Henry recommends French Dive: Living More with Less in the South of France by Eric Freeze (Slant Books, 2020). “A novelist on sabbatical with wife and four children moves from Indiana to Nice, having bought a small apartment there, which they will remodel. He learns to dive literally, spear-fishing for dinner, and figuratively, exploring self-reliance, language, character, and culture. In both thoroughness of details and moral reflections, he recalls a more sociable Thoreau. Later, as they return State-side, he feels fortunate to have transformed their apartment into a ‘haven,’ a place of accomodation and welcoming. It may ‘never answer the question of our own or others' difference,’ he muses, ‘but it would be alive with our striving.’”

Margot Livesey recommends Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: Bookmarked by Sven Birkerts (Ig Publishing, 2020). “The essayist, critic, editor, and memoirist Sven Birkerts explores Nabokov’s lustrous memoir and his relationship with it over several decades.  Birkerts is a wonderful guide on this journey. With wit, empathy, and erudition, he weaves together Nabokov’s life, the brilliant text with its many elisions and omissions, and his own thoughts about memory and memoir.  I felt privileged to be in the presence of two remarkable intellects.”

Jayne Anne Phillips suggests Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood by Christa Parravani (Henry Holt and Co., 2020). “Personally haunting and true, while connecting the dots between anti-choice policies and poor healthcare for women and children. A must-read.”

Gary Soto recommends Floaters by Martín Espada (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021). “These are brave poems with lyrical phrasing, cadence, and marvelous image-making. Some readers may see (and hear) a Whitmanesque voice here, but for me the more personal poems are the attraction. Go to ‘Be There When They Swarm Me’ and ‘Love Is a Luminous Insect at the Window.’ You’ll see.”

Richard Tillinghast recommends Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems, by Thomas Lynch (Godine, 2021). “Lynch’s poetry emerges from his deep roots in Irish American Catholicism and the history and culture of the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic. Lynch speaks with stubborn independence, irreverent humor, frank joy in the pleasures of the flesh, and a bracing acknowledgment of life’s responsibilities and sorrows.”

Rosanna Warren recommends If by Song by Marcia Karp (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021). “These are true, strange poems. They have a timbre all their own—savvily dissonant, acerbic, yearning, heart-wise. One might hear a touch of Stevie Smith in them, but the wit and passion here feel wrung from Karp’s privacy. Their testy meters keep exploring the stoic recognition ‘that poems thrive, we die, in narrows.’”