Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Peter Ho Davies recommends Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023). “A debut novel of dark, soulful magic reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado or Silvia Moreno-Garcia (and further back, Mary Shelley). The horror of grief has rarely been so viscerally or movingly evoked.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen (Henry Holt and Co., 2023). “A vividly immersive historical novel. Nothing short of a Scandi Middlemarch.”

Tess Gallagher recommends Asking by Alice Derry (Moonpath Press, 2022). “Asking is what our entire country is doing—asking how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory—by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and reproach the death and the love—its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning—this is what really makes this book sing.”

DeWitt Henry recommends On Becoming an American Writer by James Alan McPherson, selected and introduced by Anthony Wilson (Godine Nonpareil, 2023). “In this inaugural volume of Godine’s Nonpareil series, Anthony Wilson selects and arranges McPherson’s classic essays to emphasize their range and urgency for our present and future.”

DeWitt Henry recommends Cindy Hochman’s seventh chapbook, Telling You Everything (Unleash Press, 2022). “Twenty-seven poems in a variety of forms, but consistent in their wit and self-mocking confessions and complaints. Among favorites, the prose poem, ‘My baby crawls,’ which rehearses the baby’s initiatives and dangers while neglected by its writer-mother, then ends: ‘I don’t really have a baby.’”

DeWitt Henry recommends Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays by Richard Hoffman (The Humble Essayist Press, 2023). “Meditative and moral essays by the author of Half the House and Love & Fury. James Baldwin is one inspiration; but in standards of honesty, conscience, family love and aging, Andre Dubus (pere)’s late essays also come to mind. And no memoirist is more convincing in defense of the genre. ‘Back Talk and Backlash’ is necessary reading.”

Margot Livesey recommends The Archivists: Stories by Daphne Kalotay (TriQuarterly, 2023). “This Grace Paley Prize-winning story collection made me both joyful and sad, often at the same time. Like Paley, Kalotay sees the tragicomedy in life’s hardships and the absurdity of losses beyond our control. These surprising stories often take place at times of disaster—the economic recession, the 2016 election, the pandemic lockdown—and are united by themes of survival and by intimate and at times uncanny settings.”

Eleanor Wilner recommends Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023) by Sarah Audsley. “Poems of searing insight into the intimate, often wounding experience of a Korean American adoptee, torn at the roots, with the face of a culture she has never known and that sets her apart. Both revealing and reclaiming a life through the brilliance of its formal inventions, fierce lyric power, and its unsparing candor, poetry seldom demonstrates so powerfully its own necessity and value; ultimately, as she writes near the book’s close: ‘those who make their own light invent the proportions they desire.’”