Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Robert Boswell recommends I Have Her Memories Now, by Carrie Grinstead (Howling Bird Press, 2022); and It Falls Gently All Around, by Ramona Reeves (University of Pittsburg Press, 2022): “Two new story collections by remarkable young writers.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends Who You Might Be, by Leigh N. Gallagher (Henry Holt and Co., 2022): “A splintery coming-of-age novel that vividly captures both the anxious thrum of adolescence and the unsettling fragility of adulthood.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, edited by Shelly Oria (McSweeney’s, 2022): “An urgent, vital collection of essays and fiction. Such voices and stories are too often silenced or unspoken; it’s a gift to hear them now and a duty to listen.”

Jane Hirshfield recommends Let the World Have You, by Mikko Harvey (House of Anansi Press, 2022): “Mikko Harvey’s second collection spills over with unexpected precisions of perception and saying. Sometimes aphoristic, sometimes surreal, sometimes Chekhovian, these pages have kept surprising me. Oddity and depth of feeling marry, equal partners in a sui generis voice. The sentences’ knife work slips between the ribs so deftly that the reader almost doesn’t notice—until they do.”

Jane Hirshfield recommends Artful Flight: Essays and Reviews 1985-2019, by Susan Glickman (The Porcupine's Quill, 2022): “Whether writing on issues of grammar, investigating particular works, or describing the sabbatical experience of going to art school in her sixties, Toronto poet and novelist Susan Glickman is alert to the counterweight forces that keep any good work of art—or life—aloft. Her attempt, amply and richly fulfilled, is to see how the engine’s materials and designs can accurately serve; each ‘fugitive piece’ here offers expansion of feeling, knowledge, and freedom. Some titles may hint at the range: ‘Cauliflower and Taxidermy,’ ‘Second Person Impersonal,’ ‘An Infinity of Blues: Art as a Form of Attention.’”