Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Peter Ho Davies recommends A Down Home Meal for these Difficult Times, by Meron Hadero (Restless Books, 2022). “A brilliant debut collection of stories of the Ethiopian diaspora, by a writer whose work has appeared in Ploughshares and Best American Short Stories.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends Tale of the Dreamer’s Son, by Preeta Samarasan (World Editions, 2022). “A second novel (after Evening is the Whole Day) that confirms Samarasan as a wryly vibrant, passionately astute chronicler of recent Malaysian history.”

David Gullette recommends Joseph “Jay” Featherstone’s second book of poems, Glass (Fenway Press, 2019). “It was followed in 2022 by a wonderful long poem in chapbook format, Veermeer Paints My Mother, available at www.fenwaypress.com.”

David Gullette recommends Foundlings, by DeWitt Henry (Life Before Man/Gazebo Books, 2022). “He takes favorite passages from his favorite books and treats them like amazing poems. It works!”

Jane Hirshfield recommends On Not Knowing (University of Chicago Press, 2022), by Emily Ogden. “Ogden’s brief, buoyant, informative, and irresistible essays on motherhood, herding, hope, riffing, listening, and one-night stands enter their subjects through style pass-throughs: small, sturdy, and precisely angled. Ogden doesn’t fix thought to a map of itself, she invites it into an ever less-fettered conversation with her own life and the lives and words of others. This book embodies Ratty’s advice in The Wind in the Willows: ‘Believe me my young friend, there is nothing —absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ Yet its pages lead also directly into what matters.”

Jane Hirshfield recommends Still at Large (El Leon Literary Arts, 2022), by Frank Stewart. “This sui generis book is a record-in-fragments of just over a century of historical crises, from the Armenian genocide to the current crises of refugees and of war in Crimea. Each poem mixes direct quotation and Stewart’s shaping witness. In these voices’ stark juxtaposition, Stewart creates both a requiem and a testament of suffering’s bearing and (sometimes) survival.”

DeWitt Henry recommends The Cult in my Garage, stories by Duncan Birmingham (Maudlin House, 2021). “Thirteen stories of contemporary times by a writer whose penchant for biting satire and everyday absurdity, especially in Los Angeles, recalls such masters as Ring Lardner and Nathanael West. The title story was recently performed by Michaela Watkins on the podcast Selected Shorts, edited by Meg Wolitzer, and can be heard at http://www.symphonyspace.org/selected-shorts/episode/hitched.”

DeWitt Henry recommends The Very Last Interview, by David Shields (New York Review of Books, 2022). “David Shields is his own anti-Boswell, positing a last interview where speaking silences are his only answer to questions whether pertinent or impertinent to his career as a writer, literary and cultural critic, filmmaker, and person with twenty-two books to his credit. His claim is that over forty years, he’s actually been asked the questions he includes, but here has organized them by topics into an ironic, ghostly self-portrait.”

DeWitt Henry recommends The Shaman in the Library, by Jon Wesick (Human Error Publishing, 2022). “The shaman in Wesick’s fourth poetry collection is parts philosopher, magician, and malcontent, while the library is the best and worst of what has been thought and said. ‘Free from culture and convention,’ he writes, ‘he hunted at night.’ His best lines recall Pound, Bukowski, and Salinger—for instance, ‘The locomotive of responsibility crushes your heart. You must choose’; while other times, the edge of Stephen Colbert.”

Lloyd Schwartz recommends Deep Cuts, by Steve Coughlin (Finishing Line Press, 2021). “This remarkable book of witty, powerful, and moving poems—as often as not all three qualities at the same time—sounds like no one else I’ve ever read. I’ve certainly never seen a collection of poems before that includes both St. Theresa and Fats Domino, and that takes both of them equally seriously. It’s a book one can thoroughly admire and thoroughly enjoy. I can’t encourage you enough to read it.”

Maura Stanton recommends Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, by Frederick Morgan, edited by Paula Deitz (Red Hen Press, 2022). “Spare, honest, meditative poems by the founding editor of The Hudson Review that evoke a brilliant era in New York City and the abiding beauty of New England.”

Madison Smartt Bell recommends Way Out West, by Wyn Cooper (Concord Epress, 2022). “This first novel by the well-known poet and songwriter is a dark, dynamic fin de siecle romance, reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s Already Dead and other works of that high caliber.”