March continues to be a busy month for New England Review authors! Here are six more recent releases to ease you into the spring season. Check out part 1 of our March author roundup here.
Megan Mayhew Bergman’s latest collection of fiction, How Strange a Season (Scribner), captures women’s struggles and interactions with the natural world as they navigate inherited challenges. Although each story stands alone, How Strange a Season is strikingly cohesive and layered in its exploration of intimacy and grief. Mayhew Bergman is a professor in literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College and is the director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.
Robert Lopez blurs the line between reality and perception in A Better Class of People (DZanc Books), a series of linked stories set in a distorted version of New York City. As we follow a man riding the subway “through the chaos of an ordinary commute,” Lopez shuffles back and forth through time and space to show the man in other disturbing situations, illuminating topics like immigration, police brutality, and sexual harassment. Lopez’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 41.1.
Set in the backdrop of the Bahamas, Allegra Hyde‘s Eleutheria (Vintage) tackles the challenges of climate change through a thrilling utopian lens. In this debut novel, a troubled Willa Marks moves to Eleutheria to work at Camp Hope among a group of eco-warriors and their leader, Roy Adams. When she arrives in the Bahamas, she’s met with the startling realization that Adams is missing and Camp Hope’s mission is at risk. Willa yearns for hope and urgent action in this illuminating and timely tale. Hyde’s short story “Shark Fishing” appeared in NER 35.4.
Through a series of riveting mysteries, Dennis McFadden’s Old Grimes Is Dead (Summerhill Publishing) shares the fascinating resurrection of a Black man by a group of white doctors in western Pennsylvania in 1857. Although famous (or infamous) at the time, this antebellum tale is based in part on historical fact, bringing to life forgotten pieces of American lore and real characters from the past. This novel includes “Little Brier,” an excerpt originally published in NER 35.3.
From third person accounts to essays in the form of notes, instructions, and extended meditations, Matthew Vollmer’s collection This World is Not Your Home (EastOver Press) offers creative nonfiction in a variety of forms. One essay offers instructions for how to write a love story while another describes a spectacular cosmic phenomenon experienced by a husband and wife on a walk after dark. Vollmer’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 33.1.
Ethereal, transitory, and bittersweet, Yanyi’s latest poetry collection, Dream of the Divided Field (One World), proposes that our complex identities embody all of these characteristics and more. As the poet grapples with the wounds left by heartbreak and diaspora, he also deliberates on the rose-tinted manner in which we recall the things and people we love, even as memory creates an image that has little resemblance to reality. Three poems from the collection—“Catullus 85,” “Detail,” and “Dreams of the Divided Field”—were published in NER 42.3.
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