“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.