Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

DeWitt Henry recommends a hundred little pieces on the end of the world by John Rember (U. of New Mexico Press, 2020). “Rember’s meditations ‘on teaching, writing, and friendship in an increasingly fragile world’ are, above all, alert, voracious, thoughtful, and life-read. From his prospect in Sawtooth Valley, Idaho, he offers clear-minded witness of our here and now.”

DeWitt Henry recommends How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker (Mad Creek Books, 2020). “Walker’s complex wit, self-portrayal, and humanity as he contends with racist pressures have never been sharper, more unsettling, or more moving. He is what his mentor James Alan McPherson called a classic kind of narrator. My favorite, ‘Breathe,’ is one of four essays to have appeared in The Best American Essays.”

Jay Neugeboren recommends Truthtelling: Stories, Fables, Glimpses by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Delphinium, 2020). “Lynne is a master storyteller who, in these two dozen brief tales, is at the top of her game. The stories are wise, witty, poignant, and original—as earthy as they are elegant, and told in a multitude of engaging voices. The characters are vivid, quirky, and memorable, and—best of all, perhaps—they and the stories they inhabit constantly surprise us, and then surprise us again, and then again…”

Richard Tillinghast recommends So Forth by Rosanna Warren (W. W. Norton, 2020). “I don’t buy many new books, but with this one I would be poorer if I didn’t own it. One of my favorites in the book is ‘Augusting,’ which came out in Ploughshares in 2018, a poem that subtly evokes the classical world without ever mentioning it. Another favorite is ‘Shabbat Candles,’ all of five lines long, a tiny poem filled with wonders of the imagination.”

Rosanna Warren recommends H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds by Peter Filkins, a biography of the Czech-German writer H. G. Adler (Oxford University Press, 2019). “Famous for his scrupulously documented account of the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt, Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community (1955), Adler is increasingly celebrated today for his novels and poems, as well as for his late magnum opus, the sociological-philosophical account of inhumane, bureaucratic modernity, The Administered Man (1974). Adler, a secular Jew, survived more than two years as a prisoner in Theresienstadt before being deported, with his wife and her mother, to Auschwitz, where the two women were immediately gassed. After a short stint in Auschwitz, Adler was sent to two murderous labor camps, and was liberated in April 1945. He spent the rest of his life chronicling these nightmares with a scholar’s relentless precision and a survivor’s dedication. Filkins, who has translated three of Adler’s novels, traces this complex life with such grace I found myself copying whole passages into my journal. Adler discovered his own deep and idiosyncratic relation to Judaism through his experiences in the camps, a view of life informed especially by the Pirkei Avot. ‘In Auschwitz,’ he wrote, ‘I became a complete person.’ It is not often one can say this, but in this case it’s true: this book has changed my life.”