July 2019

NER Author Books

July 17, 2019

“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.

May 2019

New Books by NER Authors

May 30, 2019

“Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the publisher: Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

Paisley Rekdal is Utah’s Poet Laureate and the author of a book of essays, a hybrid photo-text memoir, and five books of poetry. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, and the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, and the Best American Poetry series. A regular NER contributor since 2005, Rekdal’s most recent NER publication, “The Erotic Wounds of War,” was featured in 39.4.

“Sze artfully matches style and content… Finely crafted and philosophical, this is a book that rewards multiple careful readings.” ―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.

Arthur Sze is the author of Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009), Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005), and The Redshifting Web (Copper Canyon, 1998). He is the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His poem “Entanglement” was featured in NER 40.1.

From the publisher: For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani (trans. Alexander Booth) captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War—and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani’s novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of a first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy’s struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless a tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.

You can purchase Love Write Large here from the publisher or from your local independent bookseller.

“In the tradition of Katherine Anne Porter, Parker’s exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Set in the hardscrabble landscape of early 1900s Oklahoma, but timeless in its sensibility, Prairie Fever traces the intense dynamic between the Stewart sisters: the pragmatic Lorena and the chimerical Elise. The two are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. That connection supersedes all else until the arrival of Gus McQueen. With honesty and poetic intensity and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, Michael Parker reminds us of the consequences of our choices. Expansive and intimate, this novel tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. In addition to New England Review, his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, and other publications. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. Read his O. Henry Prize winning story “Stop ‘n’ Go,” featured in NER 38.1.

Prairie Fever can be purchased online from the publisher here, or from your local independent bookseller.

New Books by NER Authors

December 21, 2016

9780857423689 Geltinger’s second novel traces a lavishly descriptive path through the titular landscape—finely rendered in Booth’s translation. —Publishers Weekly

Congratulations to NER author Alexander Booth on his recent translation of Gunther Geltinger’s German Moor. Moor is . . . a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood.

Booth is a writer and translator currently 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 appeared in NER 37.3.

Moor can be purchased from the University of Chicago Press and other booksellers in December.

9780190619619

Benjamin Ehrlich’s careful translation lets English-speakers explore Ramón y Cajal’s dreams, which reveal the vulnerability of one of the world’s greatest neuroscientists. In a lucid introduction, Ehrlich lays out the parallels and final divergence of Freud’s and Cajal’s scientific lives. —Laura Otis, PhD, Emory University

NER staff reader and author Benjamin Ehrlich is publishing the first English translation of the lost dream diary of Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, illustrated with Cajal’s own sketches. The text is accompanied by an introduction to the life and work of Cajal, his relationship with the famed Viennese psychoanalyst, Freud, and the historical context surrounding the contributions of two great dueling intellects. Ehrlich’s translation of Cajal’s Café Chats has appeared previously in NER and can be viewed here.

Cajal (1852–1934) explored the microscopic world of the brain and found a landscape inhabited by distinctly individual cells, later termed neurons. “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” he called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” Although he ranks among the greatest scientists in history, the name of the Nobel Prize-winning “father of modern neuroscience” is not as well-known. Before he was a neuroanatomist Cajal conducted psychiatric experiments and before Freud, his contemporary, became a psychiatrist, he worked in neuroanatomy. In public, Cajal spoke respectfully about Freud, but in private, Cajal rejected the man and his theories. In order to disprove Freud’s “lies,” Cajal started to record his own dreams in a diary, part of a notably personal book project, which he worked on from 1918 until his death in 1934. For reasons unknown, Cajal never published this work. Until recently, it was assumed that the manuscript had been destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.

Benjamin Ehrlich is a Salzburg Global Fellow. His work has appeared in Nautilus and NER 33.1. He is a co-founding editor of the Beautiful Brain, an online magazine devoted to art and neuroscience. Ben graduated from Middlebury College with Highest Honors in Literary Studies and currently serves as a nonfiction reader for NER.

The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal is now available for pre-order and will be released on December 13, 2016 by Oxford University Press.

This impressive yet approachable selection . . . offers an excellent introduction to his relentlessly crafted work. —Publishers Weekly

Replacing an earlier selected, Paul Muldoon publishes Selected Poems 1968-2014 this month from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Muldoon, originally from Ireland, is Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University, Bread Loaf School of English faculty, and poetry editor of the New Yorker. His most recent collections are Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). His essays on Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, and Seamus Heaney have appeared in NER 23.4, 24.2, and 34.2, respectively.