New England Review

More April Books by NER Authors

“Mr. Holdefer is an abundantly gifted, witty writer. His creation, his delightful doppelganger Blast, is a funny, goofy, erudite, Baron Munchausen of magic.” —Tom Frame in Genii Magazine

From the publisher: Charles Holdefer has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world’s longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full color by Royce M. Becker.

Charles Holdefer, author of four novels, including The Contractor and Back In The Game, grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France. His short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines including New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, The Antioch Review, World Literature Today, and New York Journal of Books. Read his essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism,” published in NER 32.3 and his short story “Big and Nasty,” published in NER 37.1.

Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast is available from the publisher here, or can be found at your local independent bookstore.

“With Lynne Thompson’s new collection FRETWORK, one feels spurred on by the cherished care of the American emigrant story, which is to say, the buttressing and fortifying of the dream with all of its inglorious and joyous plots and twists.” —Major Jackson

Winner of the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

Lynne Thompson is the author of three chapbooks and the poetry collections START WITH A SMALL GUITAR, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and FRETWORK. She received Honorable Mention in Pushcart Prize XLII, an Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, and was a finalist for the 2018 Toi Derricotte/Cornelius Eady Chapbook Award. Thompson serves as Reviews & Essays Editor for the literary journal Spillway. Thompson was born in Los Angeles, California, and received a BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern Law School. Read her poem “Langston won’t stay in his grave,” in NER 39.4.

Fretwork can be purchased here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time.” — Diane Seuss

From the publisher: Paris Review Staff Pick; A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection; Recommended by Buzzfeed News; A Rumpus Book Club Pick; One of Nylon’s Best Books to Read in 2019; One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019.

Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her poem “The Price of Rain,” was featured in NER 37.4, and performed at the annual NER Out Loud event in February 2017. Listen to it here.

Soft Science can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Nouns & Verbs is a lifelong manifesto on joy and vigor, a message in a bottle for all of us who ‘scrabble within the skin of time / like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor.’” —U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

From the publisher: A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 27.3 and 35.1. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.

Nouns & Verbs can be purchased from the publisher here or found at your local independent bookseller.

“‘To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices’ is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance. . . .What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” —Kaveh Akbar, The Paris Review

From the publisher: In Reenactments, Hai-Dang Phan grapples with the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as the son of Vietnamese refugees. Through a kaleidoscope of poetic forms, the past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles providing urgent perspectives on conflicts both private and public.

Hai-Dang Phanwas born in Vietnam in 1980 and grew up in Wisconsin. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2016, and the New England Review in NER 36.4 and 38.2. He is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. He currently teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Reenactments is his first book. Read his poem “My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look Like Tourists” here.

Reenactments can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“…Mills proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet’s ability to manage enormous shifts of scale… Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather’s ‘involvement in the Nagasaki mission,’ Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors’ accounts, and sifts through white sands…Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

From the publisher: Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge—particularly of the atomic bombs the US dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the US conducted throughout the twentieth century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author’s grandfather’s possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.

Tyler Mills is the author of two books of poems, Hawk Parable (winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 36.3. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center, and scholarships/fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee, the Chicago native is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University, editor-in-chief of The Account, and a resident of Santa Fe, NM.

Hawk Parable can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

New Books by NER Authors

“No one writes with a more acute attention to the immediate world than David Baker, but his relish of particulars is always subject to a broader meditation that looks behind and ahead… David Baker is one of our finest poets.” — Rodney Jones, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Elegy for the Southern Drawl and Village Prodigies

From the publisher: A sweeping poetic achievement, Swift represents David Baker’s evolution as one of American poetry’s most significant voices.

Gathering poems from eight collections—including the widely acclaimed Changeable Thunder (2001) and his masterful latest, Scavenger Loop (2015)—and adding three suites of new poems, David Baker proves himself once again “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker). With equal curiosity and candor, he explores the many worlds we all inhabit—from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighborhoods, villages, and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share.

David Baker’s last collection was Never-Ending Birds, which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His many honors include fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, and is the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Poetry and Professor of English at Denison University. His work appeared most recently in NER 37.1 and is forthcoming this summer.

Swift can be found at your local independent bookstore or online.

“Expertly orchestrated and engaging… Of the novels to come out of the #MeToo moment to date, none is more riveting, insightful, and unsettling.” — Kirkus (starred review)

From the publisher: An atmospheric and unsettling drama from a novelist acclaimed as “the literary descendent of Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith” (Boston Globe), Afternoon of a Faun combines a sharply observed study of our shifting social mores with a meditation on what makes us believe, or disbelieve, the stories people tell about themselves.

James Lasdun is the author of The Fall Guy, The Horned Man, and Seven Lies, several poetry and short story collections, and a memoir. He teaches at the New York State Writers Institute and lives in upstate New York. His writing appeared in NER 30.3.

Afternoon of a Faun can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

“These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don’t merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters―loss, desire, rage, becoming―and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense.” ―U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

From the publisher: Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s daring new poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of a body, where living things grow and wither―or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its most innovative… Jericho Brown is a poet of eros: here he wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, and several of The Best American Poetry anthologies. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), won the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award. He serves as poetry editor for The Believer. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta. His poems are featured in NER 28.1 (2007) and NER 35.3 (2014).

The Tradition can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“The poems weave recorded language from actors and soldiers with descriptions of the ‘games’ collected over Stone’s two-year anthropological study at Pineland…. Pineland’s setting allows the poet to explore the morality of war from a perspective that is analytical and viscerally haunting.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone’s two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at “Pineland,” a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine—alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart.

Nomi Stone is a poet, anthropologist, and author of a previous book of poems, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008). Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently in POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Stone has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, an MPhil in Middle East Studies from Oxford, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches at Princeton University and her ethnography in progress, Human Technology and American War, is a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier Series. Read her poem “Wonder Days,” originally published in NER 38.4.

Order Kill Class from the publisher here, or at your local independent book store.

“An older man, a younger woman, show biz, nakedness—but wait! This is the hilarious version with characters so sympathetic you root for them all, even the guy.” – Patricia Marx, New Yorker humorist and author of Him Her Him Again the End of Him

From the publisher: An incredibly timely, terrifically witty and moving debut about a young writers’ assistant on a late night comedy show and what transpires when she accepts an invitation from its enigmatic host to spend a long weekend at his mansion in Connecticut.
At once hilarious and poignant, brilliantly incisive and terrifically propulsive, Stay Up with Hugo Best is an incredibly timely exploration of sexual politics in the #MeToo age, and the unforgettable story of one young woman’s poignant stumbling into adulthood.

Erin Somers’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House Open Bar, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, the Cincinnati Review, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and was a 2016 NYC Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2016 Millay Colony resident. She lives in Beacon, New York, with her husband and daughter, and was an NER fiction reader from 2015-2017.

Stay Up with Hugo Best can be ordered here from the publisher, or purchased at your local independent bookseller.

“Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” —Rosanna Warren, judge of the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

From the publisher: Owen McLeod’s extraordinary debut maps the contours of an ordinary life: the rise and fall of romantic love, the struggle against mental illness, and the unending quest for meaning and transcendence. Ranging from sonnets and sestinas to experimental forms, these poems are unified by their musicality, devotion to craft, and openness of heart.

Owen McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives. He has held visiting positions at Yale and Mt. Holyoke. His poems have been published in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New England Review, in NER 36.4.

Dream Kitchen can be ordered here from the publisher, or purchased at your local independent bookstore.

NER Author Books

“With incisive pluck, Rosenwaike’s stories turn an empathetic and humorous eye on the time in women’s lives when the question of motherhood—whether gained or lost or desired at all—is central. Rosenwaike fearlessly plumbs the depths of women’s interior lives, giving due space to their complexity, gravity, and lightness.” –Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk

From the publisher: A candid, ultimately buoyant debut story collection about the realities of the “baby years,” whether you’re having one or not. The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or–having recently given birth–are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its portrayal of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about some of women’s most intimate experiences. Together, these twelve empathetic stories reveal pregnancy and new motherhood in all its anxiety and absurdity, darkness and wonder.

Polly Rosenwaike has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The New York Times Book Review, Glimmer Train, The Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and lives in Ann Arbor with her family. Her short story “Tanglewood” appeared in NER 35.1 (2014)

Look How Happy I’m Making You can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“This powerful collection reads like an elegy and a confession, like a slap to the face followed by a plaintive kiss, like watching bad things happen and knowing that you’re complicit. Yet cutting through every one of these essential poems is a gritty, naturalistic beauty that makes me want to read them again and again. Tap Out is a gem, and Edgar Kunz is a major talent.” —Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and Townie 

From the publisher: Approach these poems as short stories, plainspoken lyric essays, controlled arcs of a bildungsroman, and then again as narrative verse. Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s debut collection, reckons with his working class heritage. Within are poignant, troubling portraits of blue-collar lives, mental health in contemporary America, and what is conveyed and passed on through touch and words–violent, or simply absent.

Edgar Kunz was born and raised in New England. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the MacDowell Colony, Vanderbilt University, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches at Goucher College and in the MFA program at Salve Regina University. His poem “In the Supply Closet at Illing Middle” appeared in NER 36.4 (2015).

Tap Out can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“Reading this collection of essays is like taking a walk through your neighborhood with a wizard or a medieval saint: Lia Purpura can conjure visions from seed pods, a plastic bag, a city sidewalk, transforming what is right in front of you into what is really there, uncommon, untamed.  Under her gaze, the most ordinary things become not just extraordinary, but almost frighteningly radiant.” –Suzanne Berne, author of The Dogs of Littlefield

From the publisher: A trailblazer of the contemporary essay, Purpura meditates on existential subjects as diverse as eagles, irony, shadows, racially-divided neighborhoods, and the idea of beauty.

Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations. On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, and elsewhere. The title essay of All the Fierce Tethers appeared in NER 37.3 (2016). She lives in Baltimore, MD.

All the Fierce Tethers can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“With nothing less than the human condition on its mind, The Silk Road works in archetype and allegory to produce a slim (not even 150 pages!) but resounding book unlike any you’ve ever read”—Entertainment Weekly

From the publisher: The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.

Kathryn Davis is the author of seven novels, most recently Duplex. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University. Her stories “Floggins” and “Eternity” appeared in NER in 1989 (11.3) and 1982 (5.1), respectively.

The Silk Road can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.

“Tony Hoagland offers us in his poetry one of the most distinctive voices of our time. Now, in this last work of criticism he completed, he gives us a book focused directly on how a poetic voice is created, how the poet establishes a vivid personality who seems to be standing behind every line, and how in the course of the poem the poet manages to close the distance between speaker and reader to create an intimate bond. Everyone who cares about poetry will profit from this practical and luminous book.” — Carl Dennis, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Practical Gods 

From the publisher: An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice.In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning—but above all, alive.

Tony Hoagland (1953—2018) was the award-winning author of seven poetry collections, including the National Book Critics Circle Finalist What Narcissism Means to Me and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, and two essay collections. He taught at the University of Houston and conducted a community workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lived. He partnered with Martin Shaw in the translation of four Celtic poems which appeared in NER 39.3 (2018). This work was a sample from the forthcoming book of translations from Celtic poetry, Rough Gods, which will be published by Graywolf in 2020.

The Art of Voice can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.

New Books by NER Authors

“Superb, powerful, eloquent. Juxtaposing rich, poetic prose with direct storytelling, and alternating narratives with photos, documents, poems, maps, and music, LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE explores what holds a family and society together, and what pulls them apart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the publisher: From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family’s summer road trip across America–a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today. Told through the voices of a mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images–including prior stories of migration and displacement–Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, and NER 35.1. She lives in New York City.

Lost Children Archive can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.

“Anders Carlson-Wee makes the rugged physical and emotional world of the upper plains our world” —B. H. Fairchild

From the publisher: Explosive and incantatory, The Low Passions traces the fringes of the American experiment through the eyes of a young drifter. Pathologically frugal, reckless, and vulnerable, the narrator of these viscerally compelling poems hops freight trains, hitchhikes, dumpster dives, and sleeps in the homes of total strangers, scavenging forgotten and hardscrabble places for tangible forms of faith. Amplified by a chorus of monologues from the strangers who shelter him, and the family he’s left behind, a range of strong-willed characters takes shape—made manifest by the poet’s devoted ear and sensitive eye.

Anders Carlson-Wee’s poems have appeared in the Nation, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, BuzzFeed, and many other publications. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize, he lives in Minneapolis. His work appears in NER 36.1 and 39.3.

The Low Passions can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

“This arresting debut short story collection often finds its protagonists poised between disaster and redemption…Nuanced and empathetic, at times dangerous, tragic, or redemptive, these stories find their subjects in the midst of pivotal moments in their lives, as they struggle with impulses and actions both animalistically urgent and deeply, hauntingly human.” —Kirkus (starred review)

From the publisher: In these lucid, sharply observant stories, Mandeliene Smith traces the lives of men and women in moments of crisis: a woman whose husband has just died, a social worker struggling to escape his own past, a girl caught in a standoff between her mother’s boyfriend and the police. A lively and insightful collection, Rutting Season is dark, humorous, and moving, filled with complex characters who immediately demand our interest and attention.

Mandeliene Smith is a writer from Lexington, MA. Her stories have appeared in Guernica, The Sun, New England Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story “Mercy” was selected by Stephen King for the list of “100 Other Distinguished Stories” in The Best American Short Stories 2007. To support her writing habit over the years, Mandeliene has waited tables, weeded gardens, taught writing, worked as a secretary, and translated books into Braille, among other things. Smith published the story “Friday Night” in NER 25.4 (2004).

Rutting Season can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.

“…[Josip Novakovich’s] prose is so balanced and apt, with not a superfluous clause or descriptor, that it always lands artfully. This is a haunting, accomplished collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the publisher: Both absurd and melancholy, Honey in the Carcase, the newest collection from award-winning Josip Novakovich, moves from scenes as familiar as a dinner party to the brutal landscapes of war-torn Southeast Europe. A man tends bees amid the bombed-out husks of his village. A young girl takes revenge for the loss of a precious life. A Yugoslav drifter finds himself at dead ends in the American heartland. A marriage splinters over a suspicious scent. A cat and a dog enact ancient enmity in the midst of a war zone. An old debt is repaid. And a boy and a juvenile hawk seem to be on a similar quest for freedom and adventure, though violence lurks in the wilds just beyond the window.

Josip Novakovich is a Croatian-American writer who resides in Canada. His work has been translated into Croatian, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Italian, and French, among other languages. He was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 and also received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Fiction, as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Threepenny, Ploughshares, and NER 13.3-4 (1991), and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches English at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

Honey in the Carcase can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“Aurelie Sheehan writes eerie legends, intimate stories, and beguiling personal confessions that chase after the bottomless mystery inside our everyday lives. These are fictions stamped with truth, or they are true accounts suffused with the clear magic of fiction, crafted by a writer who is a gifted and lyrical seer, shrewdly attuned to what is most worth calling out from our complicated and contested reality.” —Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog

From the publisher: Aurelie Sheehan’s Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories, a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. What is the difference between fiction and a lie? These stories dwell in a netherworld between memory and the imagination, and explore ways of telling the truth without a reliance on facts.

Aurelie Sheehan is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories and the novel History Lesson for Girls. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and NER 26.3 (2005).

Once into the Night can be purchased from FC2 or at an independent bookseller near you.

“Biespiel’s finest book of poems to date. Republic Café builds on his strengths as a lyric poet with a social conscience, a latter-day Romantic in a skeptical time. Republic Café is both personal and political, much in the manner of its evident forbear, Walt Whitman. This is a postmodernist’s Romanticism.” —David Baker, author of Swift: New and Selected Poems

From the publisher: Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time, Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment.

David Biespiel is a poet, critic, memoirist, and author of Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women, and Charming Gardeners. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the New York Times, Politico, Slate, and NER 39.4 (2018).

Republic Café can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

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