Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
DeWitt Henry recommends Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2021). “Jack Smith—literary editor, novelist, critic, and philosophy teacher—recommends a league of his own, one in which I am proud to be included. Much as there was no ‘great tradition’ before the critic F. R. Leavis invented one, so here Smith is drawn to fifteen contemporaries because of his affinities for ‘the disturbing,’ ‘the dark, absurd, quirky,’ ‘literary realism,’ and ‘memoir and essay,’ but more importantly, an affinity for portrayals of the ‘human’ (meaning our common natures and worth). Of course, he also praises each writer’s social awareness, stylistic range, humor, craft, and key themes. And the collection as a whole proves capacious and moving.”
Jill McCorkle recommends Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo (Catapult, 2022). “A compassionate and wise collection that focuses on the lineage of home and the torn longing to both stay and leave.”
Jill McCorkle recommends Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen Kirby (Penguin, 2020). “These are vivid stories that delight and surprise with wonderful humor and clear eyed truth.”
Jill McCorkle recommends How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman (Scribner, 2022). “Beautifully crafted stories about strong memorable women wrestling with their histories—both the ones they have chosen and those inherited from society.”
Jay Neugeboren recommends We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama (McClelland & Stewart, 2022). “This wildly beautiful novel, epic in scale, moves back and forth in time and across continents as it traces three generations of a Tibetan family and tells the story of their lives as exiles. The narrative, which begins with China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet, is gorgeously structured, the story told with tenderness and with a restrained but felt passion that makes the lives of its characters—their individuality as well as the cultural, historical, and familial bonds that shape their destinies—palpable. This is a magnificently textured and deeply affecting novel.”
Dan Wakefield recommends Admit This to No One by Leslie Pietrzyk (Unnamed Press, 2021). “These are sharp-edged stories of contemporary life with a bite that encourages you to see what before lay hidden in polite pretensions, by the author of the socially perceptive novel Silver Girl.”
Rosanna Warren recommends In a Bucolic Land, a collection of poems by Szilárd Borbély (NYRB Poets, 2022). “I am staggered by In a Bucolic Land. In long, wending lines, the poems present many of the same scenes and characters as Borbély’s novel, but differently paced and framed: the world of his childhood—a savagely poor rural village, still scarred by World War II, by Nazi and Soviet violence, by its own ingrown anti-Semitism. Animals are tortured, people are cast off, a cow wanders into a church and sniffs at an angel’s face. A Jewish house is ‘vacant.’ Somehow, the child survives and grows up to become the poet who remembers. The book ends in desolation and suicidal temptation. The poems both ‘despise’ language and testify to a powerful faith: ‘Because speech contains form. Therefore it is immortal.’”