New England Review

Books by NER Authors

Summer 2019

Ahmed’s style of writing is simple yet powerful. She writes with honesty and compassion for each of the characters compelling the readers in kind, to empathise with their situations and plight. —The Indo-American Arts Council

From the publisher: In 1940s Calcutta, the young and lovely Yasmine Khan is the doyenne of the nightclub scene. When the US sets up a large army base in her city to fight the Japanese in Burma, Yasmine spots an opportunity—her Bombay Duck will be Calcutta’s answer to the wartime bars of London and Paris.

In luminous, incisive prose, Ahmed examines the inequities wrought by racism and colonialism. Dust Under Her Feet is a wartime tale like no other.

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed is the author of two books: a novel, Dust Under Her Feet (Amazon India/Westland Publishing, 2019), and a short story collection, The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories (Daily Star Books, 2013). She was on the writing team for season one of the TV Series, Quanticoon ABC. Her play Raisins Not Virgins will be produced as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door 2020 season. Her fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Catamaran, Caravan Magazine, Inroads, Wasafiri, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Roanoke Review. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and Artist in Residence in the Film and Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University. Her story “The Length in Six Strokes” is forthcoming in NER 40.3.

Dust Under Her Feet can be purchased here.

From the publisher:  lucida intervalla is a Latin phrase describing one of those startling “lucid intervals” experienced by the insane. Lucida Intervalla, as imagined by John Kinsella―the Australian poet and novelist―is an art journalist, artist, and social media sensation whose brilliant presence beguiles every one around her.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world scarcely distinguishable from our own, Kinsella’s new novel follows her exploits and thoughts about art, political protest, eternity, and the absolute. At once a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas whose prose echoes everything from Søren Kierkegaard to Twitter, Lucida Intervalla may well be Kinsella’s masterpiece.

John Kinsella is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, and has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards, including a Fellowship from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council. His work can be found in NER 36.1, and his translation, From Aftering Delmore Schwartz‘s “A Season in Hell” is forthcoming this fall in NER 40.3.

Lucida Intervalla can be purchased from the publisher here. Also available in an American edition by Dalkey Archive Press.

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 In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty.

Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation’s name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa’s writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.

Khaled Mattawa currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. His latest book of poems is Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010). A MacArthur Fellow, he is the editor of Michigan Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in NER several times, most recently in NER 40.1.

Mare Nostrum can be purchased from the publisher here.

Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes, in Sharon Dolin’s beautiful translation, is by far the best book of prose poems I have read in the past decade. Like a house mirror, each prose poem here “retains the memory of all the souls who have gazed at themselves inside it.” The result is spellbinding and surprising, as the voice of these poems searches for the mystery within the mundane.—Ilya Kominsky, author of Deaf Republic

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From the publisher: The poems in Book of Minutes move seamlessly from philosophical speculation to aphorism, condensed narrative, brief love letter, and prayer, finding the metaphysical in even the most mundane. In the space of one or two paragraphs, they ponder God, love, language, existence, and beginnings and endings both large and small. In her openness to explore these and many other subjects, Gorga’s leitmotif might well be “light.” Carrying with them echoes of Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hans Christian Andersen, Francis Ponge, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson, the poems in Book of Minutes are nonetheless firmly in the twenty-first century, moving in a single breath from the soul to diopters or benzodiazepine. In deft, idiomatic translation from Sharon Dolin, Book of Minutes also retains the original Catalan texts on facing pages.

Gemma Gorga has published six collections of poetry, most recently Mur (Barcelona, 2015), which won the Premi de la Crítica de Poesia Catalana for the best book of poetry published in Catalan for that year. Her work appears in NER 37.1.

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). Her work appears in NER 37.1.

Book of Minutes can be purchased at your local, independent bookstore or directly from the publisher.

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A darkly cutting investigation of dysfunction in which the kids, more often than not, are way sharper than the parents —Kirkus starred review

From the publisher: Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.

Anthony Varallo is the author of four short story collections, most recently Everyone Was There. He is professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina. His work appears in NER 28.2.

The Lines can be found at your local bookstore, or purchased from the University of Iowa Press.

Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world… What really glitters, of course, are the words themselves, radiant particulars in a world that is mostly inhospitable and bleak. —Mark Rudman, London Review of Books

From the publisher: One Lark, One Horse is a remarkable assemblage of work that will delight loyal readers and enchant new ones with Michael Hofmann’s approachable, companionable voice. In style, [Hofmann’s] voice is as unmistakable as ever—sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate—and this collection shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European and American imaginations. The poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as aging and memory, place, and the difficult existence of the individual in an ever-bigger and more bestial world.

Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. FSG has published his Selected Poems, his book of prose, Where Have You Been? Selected Essays, his anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry, and his translations of Gottfried Genn and Durs Grünbein. He teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida. His translation of Joseph Roth’s “Stationmaster Fallmerayer” appears in NER 23.1.

One Lark, One Horse can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local, independent bookstore.

In Threshold Delivery, Patty Seyburn’s wit is gorgeously, ruthlessly inventive—death-harrowed and hope-shaded; it is deployed not for its own sake, but in the service of a moment when mortal truths break a poem, and us, wide open. —Dorothy Barresi, author of What We Did While We Made More Guns

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From the publisher: Threshold Delivery takes a lyrical look at mortality, exploring, with pathos and humor, the intersection between personal history and cultural inheritance, risk and responsibility, and the flow of absence and presence—including, at the Mah Jongg table.

Patty Seyburn is a professor at California State University, Long Beach. Her previous books are Perfecta (What Books Press, 2014), Hilarity (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998).

Threshold Delivery can be purchased from the publisher here!

July 2019

NER Author Books

“Extraordinary . . . I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly as Three Women.” —Elizabeth Gilbert

From the publisher: Desire as we’ve never seen it before: a riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts, destroys our lives, and it’s all we live for. Yet we almost never speak of it. And as a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now. Over the past eight years, journalist Lisa Taddeo has driven across the country six times to embed herself with ordinary women from different regions and backgrounds. The result, Three Women, is the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written and one of the most anticipated books of the year.

Lisa Taddeo has contributed to New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour, and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Political Writing anthologies, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband and daughter in New England. Her story “Forty-Two” was published in NER 36.1 and featured in the NER Out Loud live event.

Three Women can be purchased through the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

From the publisher: In Poetry and Time, [Max] Neumann’s haunting images are accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of poems, stating: “They know what it is they do, but do not say it.” Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson, Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of transience and mortality at the center of poems’ reasons for being, their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being inextricably bound to time. Sartorius’s ruminations beautifully complement Neumann’s series of thirty poignant paintings, making this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations were featured in NER 37.3.

Poetry and Time can be purchased from the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

From the publisher: Time Inside, Gary Margolis’s seventh book of poems, takes us behind the walls, through the metal gates of his experience leading a poetry workshop for inmates in a maximum security correctional facility, and back out to the surrounding worlds of love’s nature and memory’s hold and release of us. Emblematic of Margolis’s writing, sometimes in phrases, sometimes in sentences, Margolis always has an ear for a line’s turning. Each poem finds its centering image that arrests the heart. With clarity, humor, and a counselor’s and poet’s eye, Margolis sees the keys and latches of dark and light inside our time.

An award-winning poet and counselor, Gary Margolis is Emeritus Executive Director of College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College. He was a Robert Frost and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow and has taught at the University of Tennessee, Vermont, Bread Loaf, and Green Mountain Writers’ Conferences. His poem “The Interview” was featured on National Public Radio’s The Story, and after the 2004 World Series he read his poem “Winning the Lunar Eclipse” on Boston’s ABC Channel 5. His poem “In Audubon’s Notebook” was featured in NER 23.1.

Time Inside can be purchased through the publisher or from your local independent bookstore.

“This spectacular work will delight and awe readers with Lock’s magisterial wordsmithing.”— Library Journal (starred review)

From the publisher: In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873–79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab’s, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant’s Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city. Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Lock has appeared in NER several times, “A Theory of the Self” his most recent contribution in NER 34.2.

Feast Day of the Cannibals can be purchased through the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

“Powerful and probing, Stanton’s book offers a sharp portrait of a wayward girl ‘leaping backward’ into disaster. . . A compellingly honest coming-of-age memoir.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the publisher: For Maureen Stanton’s proper Catholic mother, the town’s maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line. But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton’s once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. Stanton too slips into delinquency—vandalism, breaking and entering—all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon’s “total war” on drugs. Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.      

Maureen Stanton, the author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, has been awarded the Iowa Review prize, a Pushcart Prize, the American Literary Review award in nonfiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Stanton teaches at UMass Lowell, and her work appeared most recently in NER 39.2.

Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood can be purchased online from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt or at your local independent bookstore.

“The Wound, with timely and urgent precision, leads the reader to value its activist energy and depth of insight into the ‘ambiguities’ of the human condition, in which intuitions of dwelling in peace are at war with an impulse—always a repulsive one from Kinsella’s perspective—to conquer and master.” —Michael O’Neill, The London Magazine

From the publisher: The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella. The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area’s wildlife . . . In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity.

John Kinsella is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, and has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards, including a Young Australian Creative Fellowship and a two-year Fellowship from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council. His work can be found in NER 36.1 and is forthcoming this fall in 40.3.

The Wound can be purchased from the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

June 2019

New Books by NER Authors

“Don’t miss Hazel Hicks. She may try you, she may frustrate you, she may exasperate you. But you will not forget her.” — Castle Freeman, Jr.

From the publisher: Hazel is a portrait of an ordinary and exceptional person, revealed in a sequence of narratives that present chapters of her life from childhood into her senior years.

David Huddle is the author of more than twenty previous books, including fiction, essays, and poetry. His novel Nothing Can Make Me Do This (Tupelo, 2011) won the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction, and his Black Snake at the Family Reunion won the PEN New England Award for Poetry. He teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and the Rainier Writing Workshop. A native of Ivanhoe, Virginia, Huddle has lived in Vermont for over four decades, and served as Acting Editor of the New England Review from 1993 to 1995 and as Contributing Editor in 1988. Read his stories “Poison Oak,” published in NER 1.3, and “Scotland,” from NER 13.2.

Hazel can be ordered from the publisher here, or purchased at your local independent book store.

“This collection is magical, hypnotic, brilliant.” — Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers.

From the publisher: Going where most readers have never been — past the workshop door, behind the curtain to the hidden rehearsal space, and into the back room of a pawn shop or dealer’s office, Gregory Spatz’s new book delves deeply into the world of those who build, play, and sell (or steal) violins. This is a realm of obsession, of high-stakes sales and thefts, and of rapturous but also desperate performance escapades. Dense with detail, and peopled with a fabulously particular (yes, eccentric) ensemble cast, the linked pieces in What Could Be Saved—two of novella length, and two stories—have the intense force and beauty of chamber music.

Gregory Spatz is the author of the novels Inukshuk, Fiddler’s Dream, and No One But Us, and of the story collections Half as Happy and Wonderful Tricks. The recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Washington State Book Award, and an NEA Fellowship in literature, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Spatz plays the fiddle in the twice Juno-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds. His stories have appeared such publications as The New Yorker, Glimmer Train Stories, Shenandoah, Epoch, Kenyon Review and New England Review, where his work has been featured in over seven issues: first in 1992 (NER 14.2), and most recently in 2017 (NER 38.4).

What Could be Saved can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal… Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” — Ron Charles, The Washington Post


From the publisher: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. 

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Read his poem “To My Father/To My Unborn Son” published in NER 36.1.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

“Aronson’s examination of medical culture in stories, of the brutality and tenderness at home and hospital, is a gem. [Her] voice is tender and one from which I hope we’ll hear more histories in the future.” — Washington Independent Review of Books 


From the publisher: Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that’s neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy — a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author’s own words, “an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being.”

Louise Aronson has an MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and an MD from Harvard Medical School. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California where she cares for diverse, frail older patients and directs the Pathways to Discovery Program, the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center and UCSF Medical Humanities. She lives in San Francisco. Read her piece “Necessary Violence” published in NER 38.3.

Elderhood can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

An extraordinary novel by war correspondent Grossman, completing, with Life and Fate, a two-volume Soviet-era rejoinder to War and Peace… A classic of wartime literature finally available in a comprehensive English translation that will introduce new readers to a remarkable writer.
— Kirkus, starred review

From the publishers: The story told in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters include mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political activists, steelworkers, and peasants, along with Hitler and other historical figures. In Stalingrad, published here for the first time in English translation, and in its celebrated sequel, Life and Fate, Grossman writes with extraordinary power and deep compassion about the disasters of war and the ruthlessness of totalitarianism, without, however, losing sight of the little things that are the daily currency of human existence or of humanity’s inextinguishable, saving attachment to nature and life.

The Robert and Elizabeth Chandlers’ other translations include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (Vintage Classics, 2012) and works by Vasily Grossman (NYRB Classics). Robert Chandler has edited and served as primary translator for Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, and co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. The Chandlers’ translation of Teffi’s “Lifeless Beast” appeared in NER 34.3-4.

Stalingrad can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

“A brilliant, sorrowful, hopeful, hilarious, painfully honest love letter, not just to Stoner but to writing, marriage, teaching, reading, parenting, even death. Which makes this book, like the one it praises, a love letter to life.” — Matthew Zapruder, author of Come On All You Ghosts and Why Poetry


From the publisher: Stoner tells the story of William Stoner. Born into a poor Missouri farming family at the end of the nineteenth century, Stoner is sent to the state university to study agronomy. Instead, he falls in love with literature and becomes a professor. In this achingly beautiful novel, we witness the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner’s life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, and the failure of his academic career to prosper, all set against the dramatic changes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Against Football and Candyfreak. His short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the Best American Mysteries, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He hosts the New York Times “Dear Sugars” podcast with Cheryl Strayed. His story “The Course of True Love” appeared in NER 38.2 and a new story will be published in 40.2 (summer 2019).

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

May 2019

New Books by NER Authors

“Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the publisher: Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

Paisley Rekdal is Utah’s Poet Laureate and the author of a book of essays, a hybrid photo-text memoir, and five books of poetry. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, and the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, and the Best American Poetry series. A regular NER contributor since 2005, Rekdal’s most recent NER publication, “The Erotic Wounds of War,” was featured in 39.4.

“Sze artfully matches style and content… Finely crafted and philosophical, this is a book that rewards multiple careful readings.” ―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.

Arthur Sze is the author of Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009), Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005), and The Redshifting Web (Copper Canyon, 1998). He is the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His poem “Entanglement” was featured in NER 40.1.

From the publisher: For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani (trans. Alexander Booth) captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War—and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani’s novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of a first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy’s struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless a tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations were featured in NER 37.3.

You can purchase Love Write Large here from the publisher or from your local independent bookseller.

“In the tradition of Katherine Anne Porter, Parker’s exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Set in the hardscrabble landscape of early 1900s Oklahoma, but timeless in its sensibility, Prairie Fever traces the intense dynamic between the Stewart sisters: the pragmatic Lorena and the chimerical Elise. The two are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. That connection supersedes all else until the arrival of Gus McQueen. With honesty and poetic intensity and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, Michael Parker reminds us of the consequences of our choices. Expansive and intimate, this novel tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. In addition to New England Review, his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, and other publications. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. Read his O. Henry Prize winning story “Stop ‘n’ Go,” featured in NER 38.1.

Prairie Fever can be purchased online from the publisher here, or from your local independent bookseller.

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