New England Review

Fall 2021

New Books by NER Authors

Autumn is upon us at the New England Review office, and so is literary release season! Here are six more recent releases from NER authors.

The Mighty Oak (Blackstone Publishing), Jeff W. Bens’s sophomore novel, receives a paperback release this month. An emotional tale, set into action by the death of a mother and a middle-aged hockey-playing antihero’s journey home, The Mighty Oak “tackles male violence, the complexities of parenthood, and the contrary draw to both numbness and connection in wholly alive and thrilling ways.” Bens’s short story, “Golden Day,” appeared in NER 19.1.

Playwright, author, and translator James Magruder’s Vamp Until Ready (Rattling Good Yarns Press) creates a unique portrait of Ithaca in the ’80s through the linked narratives of a small cast of characters, all affiliated by employment at the Hangar Theatre. A “pleasant romp” in ‘townie’ community and character, Vamp Until Ready promises to explore identity and chance. Magruder’s piece, “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème,” was published in NER 32.3.

Susan Daitch, whose essays were published in NER 42.1, releases her new novel Siege of Comedians (Dzanc) this October. Told in triptych, the novel’s three arcs thread, “across time by intersecting crimes and themes of language, cultural assimilation, and nationalist conflicts.” Described as “part political thriller, part comic noir,” Siege of Comedians engages with human trafficking and refugee crises alongside broader issues of identity. 

Poet, frequent NER contributor, and former director of Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Michael Collier publishes Missing Mountain (University of Chicago Press). Collier’s eighth poetry collection, comprised of new and selected poems, both chronicles and celebrates “the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of his passions and concerns.” Collier’s poetry has appeared most recently in NER 32.3, and his “Tribute to Steve Orlen,” appeared in NER 31.4.

Author and Middlebury alumnus Peter Knobler collaborates with Bill Bratton in a new memoir, The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America (Penguin Press). Building around Bratton’s experience as a police chief and commissioner in Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston, The Profession provides insider insight to the examination of policing, past and present. Knobler’s essay “Dancing in the Dark” appeared in NER Digital in 2018.

Alex McElroy’s debut novel, The Atmospherians (Simon & Schuster), follows two friends, Sasha and Dyson, as they embark on an entrepreneurial journey to solve toxic masculinity. Heralded by early critics as “darkly funny and glitteringly satirical,” the novel explores contemporary issues at the intersections of wellness, wokeness, social media culture, and gender politics. McElroy was a 2017 finalist for the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. Their piece, “Endure,” was included in NER 37.4.

Cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases can be found at our Bookshop.org page.

New Books from NER Authors: September 2017

Wesley Rothman’s pulsating debut Subwoofer is a collection of the needful songs we sing for each other. The poems are full of gorgeous and introspective exclamations made out of protest, out of rhymes, out of metronomes, oceans, and love. Each poem crackles with its own unexpected rhythms and the sum of all these exquisite sounds is a thoughtful exploration of spirituality and wonder.   —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

From the publisher: Subwoofer makes audible the deep bass of history, for this is a book of vibrant, honest listening: to the voices of Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Basquiat; to those without names; to the sadness of loss and the bitter silences within privilege and racism; to the luck of being alive. This book of witness, elegy, and renewal makes a noise that is joyful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.

Wesley Rothman’s work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Golden Shovel Anthology, among others. Recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, Rothman teaches in Washington, DC, while pursuing a doctorate in literature.

Subwoofer can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

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Vicious and haunting, luminescent and big-hearted, Alex McElroy’s writing burrows its way to the deep tissue of feeling and lodges there, determined. A gripping and nervy dissection of familial ties and the ambivalent bonds that structure our reality, Daddy Issues will leave you undone.
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

From the publisher: There are oil slicks in a patrilineal line—spaces in which paternal securities and filial affections lurch and loosen. So how does a daddy make do? In Alex McElroy’s collection Daddy Issues, daddies mourn their children; daddies absent themselves from their children; daddies take the shapes of celebrities to steal away the disguised wives of their children. Sometimes, daddies burn in a barn. Through an accumulation of gears, string, and brute pectoral muscle, McElroy brings these daddies back to life that we may see them as they are, in all their splendor and flop.

Alex McElroy’s writing appears in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and New England Review. He is the recipient of the 2016 Neutrino Prize from Passages North. His essay Endure was recently featured in NER 37.4 (Hear it read at NER Out Loud by Steven Medina.)

Daddy Issues can be purchased directly from its publisher The Cupboard.

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Weil showcases his narrative abilities in these offbeat and spirited stories . . .Weil’s stories have the scope and detours of longer work, and often seem to move on their own, following the protagonists’ unpredictable lives. The breadth of subject matter and styles is impressive, defying easy categorization and making the stories all the more memorable.―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Following his debut Dayton Literary Peace Prize-winning novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history. Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.

Josh Weil is the author of The Great Glass Sea and The New Valley. A Fulbright Fellow and National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, he has been awarded The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a Pushcart. His essay “Liberation Square” appeared in NER 27.2.

The Age of Perpetual Light is published by Grove Press and can be found online.

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This Blessed Earth is a sort of universal story of family farmers and all they’re up against in their efforts to take care of the land and make a living from it. It’s also a crash course in the history that brought us to this place of corporate power, shrinking resources, and a changing climate. But it plants seeds of hope as the next generation prepares to inherit the family land and all the joys and challenges that come with it.—Willie Nelson, founder and president of Farm Aid

From the publisher: For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

Ted Genoways is an acclaimed journalist and author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. A contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard, he is the winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and is a two-time James Beard Foundation Award finalist. His work has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 33.4.

This Blessed Earth can be purchased directly from its publisher Norton.

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Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language―especially where gender is concerned―to more fully capture the experience of a self “unlimited in its possibilities.” The setting of her third collection is woodsy, nocturnal, and by turns sinister and merciful; where “it did get dark” enough to see the stars “but how bright it was.” A range of characters compose a makeshift cast―or family―fluid enough to include a hermit, a cowboy, and a dowager. These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization.
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work by a space-age balladeer.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two previous collections. Her poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 36.3.

Rocket Fantastic can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

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The body becomes more than mystical in [Calling a Wolf a Wolf], as the boundaries between flesh and world are not merely blurred, but shattered—bodies are thrown upon all the sharp crooked edges of life and Akbar diligently records every detail of the aftermath. . . —Frontier Poetry

From the publisher: This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in the New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida. His poem “No Is A Complete Sentence” was recently published in NER 37.4.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf can be purchased online directly from its publisher Alice James.

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Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans.―Jamaal May

From the publisher: Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and “the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.”

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poem “Exiliados” was recently published in NER 38.1 .

Unaccompanied can be purchased online from its publisher, Copper Canyon Press.

Join Us for the Third Annual "NER Out Loud"

February 24, 8 pm, Middlebury Dance Theatre

In partnership with the Mahaney Center for the Arts and Oratory Now, NER is pleased to present the third annual “NER Out Loud” event. Six Middlebury students from Oratory Now will read selected prose and poetry published in NER in 2016. After the show, join us for the “S’More Readings” reception, an opportunity to hear student readers present their original work, collect copies of student publications, and enjoy s’mores and other gourmet treats.

The “Out Loud” readers include Ellen Colton ’19 (reading Alison Stagner’s “Midnight”), Josh Espy ’17 (reading Maciej Milkowski’s “The Week of German Cinema”), Jabari Matthew ’17 (reading Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “Still Life…”), Steven Medina ’17 (reading Alex McElroy’s “Endure”), Melanie Rivera ’19 (reading Alia Volz’s “Chasing Arrows”), and Nia Robinson ’19 (reading Franny Choi’s “The Price of Rain”). Student publications Blackbird, Frame, Middlebury Geographic, and Translingual will be featured at the “S’More Readings” reception.

Please join us on Friday, February 24, at 8 PM in the Dance Theatre in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts. The reception will take place directly outside the theater immediately following the main performance. Admission is free, and all are welcome!

New England Review Award for Emerging Writers

Finalists announced for 2017

New England Review announces, with enormous pleasure, the finalists for the third annual New England Review Emerging Writers Award.

DSC_3006Please join us in congratulating our six finalists for 2017:

Alex McElroy (37.4)
Amy Meng (37.4)
Kate Petersen (37.2)
Genevieve Plunkett (37.4)
Christine Robbins (37.1)
Alan Rossi (37.4)

The winner, to be announced later this month, will receive a scholarship to the 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Congratulations to them all—we are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in all three genres.

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