October continues to be a busy publication month for NER authors!
More new books this month include a memoir from poet Natasha Trethewey, a book of bedtime stories for adults from Charles Holdefer, a volume of poetry from Jan Beatty, and a new novel in a multi-volume masterwork from Eugene Mirabelli.
You can shop these October books and more from fall 2020 on the New England Review‘s Author Books Fall 2020 Bookshop page.
Our authors have had a busy publication schedule this October! Some of their new books this month include include a mock-epic poem from Sydney Lea, a debut full-length poetry collection from Carlos Andrés Gómez, a series of personal essays from Peter LaSalle, a volume of poetry from Fiona Sze-Lorrain and a collection of essays from Michael Cohen.
Find them and more from the fall on the New England Review‘s new bookshelf at Bookshop.org.
“Short, sharp, and quietly brutal. . . . [What Are You Going Through] is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering? Dryly funny and deeply tender.”—Kirkus, STARRED review
From the publisher: A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.
Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, and For Rouenna, among others. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and the 2018 National Book Award for her New York Times-bestselling novel The Friend. She lives in New York City. Her fiction appeared in NER 18.3.
“What Scholastique Mukasonga accomplishes with this collection is nothing short of alchemy… Mukasonga is a genius and her work should be savoured again and again.” — Diriye Osman, author of Fairytales For Lost Children
From the publisher: Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.
Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956 and experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of La femme aux pieds nus in 2008 and L’Iguifou in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahmadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the 2013 Océans France Ô prize, and the 2014 French Voices Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary award. Her work has appeared numerous times in NER in translations by Melanie Mauthner, most recently in 41.3.
(Starred review in Publishers Weekly) In Jeff W. Bens’s blistering latest (after Albert, Himself), Tim “Oak” O’Connor is an enforcer for a West Texas Hockey League team. During a two-month suspension for injuring another player, Oak flies home to Boston for his mother’s funeral. There, he’s ashamed to be seen by Kate, his 14-year-old estranged daughter from a failed marriage. Oak, addicted to painkillers from all the damage the game has done to his body and mind, works odd (and sometimes illegal) jobs, such as stealing copper wiring from a demolition site with his old friend, Slats, now married to Oak’s ex and raising Kate, while reflecting on his years of absence and regrets. Oak gets some hope from a new relationship with Joan Linney, an attorney who defends him after he is arrested for hitting a cop, and bonds with Kip, a 14-year-old boy he rescues from bullying outside a hockey rink. Both Joan and Kip play an important role as Oak struggles to make a new life for himself, both in and out of the rink. Oak is deeply tragic, a man of good intentions who is dogged by bad luck and worse impulse control; the author makes his story an emotionally fraught and enriching one for the reader. Filled with memorable characters, pungent dialogue, and a lean, hard-bitten writing style, Bens’s superb novel brilliantly faces down traditional notions of manhood.
Jeff W. Bens’s story, Golden Day, appeared in NER 19.1 (1998).
The Mighty Oak can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.
“Because Biespiel is Jewish (though admittedly ‘retired’) he is compelled to remember. Because he is a storyteller, he caresses the complex characters and places of his past. And finally, because he is a poet, he makes it all sing—gorgeously.” —Lia Purpura, National Book Critics Circle finalist and author of All the Fierce Tethers
From the publisher: Acclaimed poet and essayist David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of a Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life’s central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home? Written in the years that followed the devastation of Houston wrought by three 500-year floods in three years, including the worst flood in Texas history, Biespiel’s account is by turns personal and philosophical, a meditation on time’s inevitable losses and a writer’s hard-won gains. A Place of Exodus is not only a memoir, but an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far—and equally those who have stayed close to the unresolvable paradoxes of home, the aches of time and heart none of us can escape.
David Biespiel is a contributing writer at the New Republic, the New Yorker, Poetry, Politico, and Slate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and is the editor of two anthologies. His most recent books include: Republic Café and The Education of a Young Poet. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University, a core faculty member in the Rainier Writers Workshop MFA Program, and founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Three of his poems appeared in NER 39.4.
A Place of Exodus can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.
“Wang sees deeply into his subject. With offhand precision, his stories present a vision of recent China that feels utterly genuine even when he is raucously, indubitably inventing. This is political fiction of a high caliber.”—Sharon Solwitz, author of Once, in Lourde
From the publisher: Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang’s debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history—such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival.
Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi Province. He immigrated to the United States when he was six and has lived in ten states and fifteen cities. In 2010, he completed his PhD in Literature at Florida State University. Before that, he received his MFA in Fiction at Purdue. His work has appeared in New England Review, Greensboro Review, Day One, and Juked, among others, and they have won an AWP Intro Award and been selected by the Best American Anthology as a notable story of the year. He lives with his wife and pets at Russellville, Arkansas, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Arkansas Tech University. The titular story of this collection first appeared in NER 36.2. Read his “Behind the Byline” interview on the story here.
Further News of Defeat can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.
“Corral nimbly bridges the personal and political, evoking themes of migration to ask what it means to be unwanted.”—New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy
From the publisher: Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
“Here is a particular heart and mind removing its shield in order to commune, to help us see the world again, more deeply and more strangely, and reader, I am grateful.”—Allison Benis White, author of The Wendy’s
From the publisher: Took House is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. In vulnerable poems of obsession, Camp places motivation deep in the background, following instead a chain reaction between pain and pleasure. Took House navigates a landscape of bone and ash, wine and circumstance. Boundaries shift between reality and allegory. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.
Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections. One Hundred Hungers, Camp’s third book, won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, Tupelo’s most prestigious poetry prize. Previous books have been shortlisted for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and the New Mexico- Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet ore, Slice, DIAGRAM and elsewhere, and many have been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish. Her poem “Winter of Tumult and Artifact” appeared in NER 36.4.
Took House can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.
“In prose so rapt with noticing you can almost believe the page remembers the tree it was. This is the poet’s final blessing: to hold the precious world in two good hands and say goodbye.”—Linda Gregerson, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of The Selvage
From the publisher:After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance—looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends—the relationships that sustained him throughout his life—as well as unflinching self-portraits.lending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly’s life.
Stanley Plumly (1939—2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Old Heart. He was also the author of four books of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes and The Immortal Evening, winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. His other honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018. His poetry has appeared in NER many times over the years, most recently in issue 40.1.
Middle Distance can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.
“Nezhukumatathil is the environmental writer we should be reading in schools, instead of Emerson or Thoreau.” ―The New Southern Fugitives
From the publisher: From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Read her poem “The Two” in NER 34.3-4.
World of Wonders can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.