New England Review

March 2021

New Books by NER Authors

Our prolific New England Review writers continue to amaze us with their March book publications.

Jessie Van Eerden, Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, recently published Call It Horses (Dzanc Books). According to John Englehardt, “…this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives.” Jessie Van Erden shared a new look at the story of Mary and Maria in NER 40.3, and you can hear her speak more about it on episode 13 of our podcast.

Novelist and short story writer, Brock Clarke released I, Grape; or the Case for Fiction (Acre Books) where he approaches the art of fiction from different angles. Clarke has published frequently in NER, most recently with the story “Transported” in NER 35.3.

Kim Addonizio’s eighth volume of poetry, Now We’re Getting Somewhere (Norton), “…is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out.” Addonizio’s poem, “Thousands of Times Throughout the Day” was featured in NER 36.3.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) is a compilation of poems from the past twenty years of his work along with new poems. A New York Times Book Review critic wrote, “He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.” Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was published in NER 16.1!

You can shop these March titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.

Books by NER Authors

August 2019

Unquestionably the funniest novel ever written about Calvinism. —Kirkus Reviews

From the publisher: With the comic unpredictability of a Wes Anderson movie and the inventive sharpness of a John Irving novel, author Brock Clarke introduces readers to an ordinary man who is about to embark on an absurdly extraordinary adventure.

Brock Clarke is the author of four previous novels—The Happiest People in the World, Exley, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, and The Ordinary White Boy, along with three collections of short stories, most recently The Price of the Haircut. Clarke is a frequent contributor to NER. His story “Transported” appeared in NER 35.3.

Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? can be purchased directly from Algonquin Books or from your local bookstore.

Mead propels readers forward, using plain language that’s elegant in its simplicity yet compelling and heartbreaking. Even as she confronts grief and loss, the poet highlights the overriding theme of courage. —Library Journal

From the publisher: With lyric candor and emotional precision, Mead offers her family history, meditations on loss and madness, and the landscape of California wine country in this collected volume. The natural world, in its bounty and brutality, is a grounding force for Mead, a reminder of a time scale beyond the human span.

Jane Mead is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016) which was nominated for a National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Griffin Prize in Poetry. Her work appeared in NER 37.3.

To the Wren: Collected & New Poems is available through Alice James or from your local bookstore.

A book of wonders and a book of wondering, this is Alexandra Teague’s most ambitious, accomplished, an intimate book yet. — Mary Szybit, author of Incarnadine

From the publisher: This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors’ model Audrey Munson—calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form. 

Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry, Mortal Geography, winner of the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders, as well as the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, and a professor at the University of Idaho. Teague has been previously published in both NER 29.2 and 25.1, and NER Digital—”Stone Disease” and “Safe.”

Or What We’ll Call Desire is available for purchase from Persea Books or at your local, independent bookstore.

A masterful work of speculative fiction, The Memory Police is set on a nameless island where every instance of a plant, animal, or object occasionally vanishes without a trace. . . . If that isn’t creepy enough, there’s also an armed force of ‘memory police’ dedicated to erasing all evidence of whatever has vanished. An unforgettable literary thriller full of atmospheric horror. —Chicago Tribune

From the publisher: On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

Yoko Ogawa’s surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

Translator Stephen Snyder is Dean of Language Schools and Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), and has translated works by Yōko Ogawa and Kenzaburō Ōe, among others. His translation of Ogawa’s Hotel Iris (Picador, 2010) was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011, and his translation of Ogawa’s Revenge (Picador, 2013) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2014. He appeared in NER 37.4 with Insistence and Resistance: Murakami and Mizumura in Translation.

The Memory Police can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

New Books from NER Authors

Brock Clarke’s superb stories—exemplars of tragicomic voice and escalation—move ever forward on the tracks of his characters’ rigorous but self-delusional logic. What a pleasure it is to read an artist who is in such complete control of talent and technique. —Chris Bachelor, author of The Throwback Special

From the publisher: Each of Clarke’s stories offers a complete submersion into a whimsically distorted world: In “The Pity Palace,” a lonely man in Florence, Italy tries to win back his wife—who may or may not exist—from the novelist Mario Puzo —who may or may not still be alive. In “Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife,” a husband and wife try to get beyond a marital speed bump and decide to spend a night in the bed and breakfast that was once the home of infamous axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. In “Children Who Divorce,” the child actors from the movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory re-create their roles in a dinner theater sequel, but despite having grown older, they have never actually grown up.

The title story, which takes place after a black teenager is shot by a white policeman, delivers a sharp and biting dissection of racial attitudes in contemporary America. “I moved to Cincinnati in June 2001, two months after an unarmed nineteen-year-old black man named Timothy Thomas was shot and killed by a white city policeman named Stephen Roach,” explains Clarke. “This was a familiar story then, and it’s a familiar story now . . .”

Brock Clarke, recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature in 2008 and the winner of a Pushcart Prize for fiction in 2009, is the author of two previous story collections and four novels, most recently The Happiest People in the World and Exley, which was named a Kirkus Book of the Year. He currently lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.

The Price of the Haircut can be purchased directly from the publisher, Algonquin Books.

 

So much happens in these intensely lyrical poems, accompanied by such subtle music and profound, often witty, meditations on love, loneliness, rapture and mortality. This is a beautiful book, one that asks us to see the everyday world anew, and discover in it marvelous strangeness. —Kevin Prufer

From the publisher: Ranging from love song to train song to jump rope rhyme, the poems of Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country are voiced by perpetual outsiders searching for a sense of place from small Southern towns to the tunnels and tracks of the urban North. Personal and regional histories blur through the intimate paths of tornadoes, guns, suburban sprawl, and the ongoing quest to escape where we come from.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of The Spokes of Venus and Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is cofounder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious.

Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country can be purchased directly from the publisher, Carnegie Mellon University Press.

New Books for November from NER Authors


brocke-clarkeClarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down—Publishers Weekly

Brock Clarke has published his new book, The Happiest People in the World. Clarke’s work has appeared in several issues of NER, most recently in the current issue and 33.1.

Clarke is the author of five works of fiction, including the novels Exley and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. His fiction and non-fiction have been included in a number of magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies, and have earned him an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, among other awards.

 

lewisFor Lewis, roller derby represents some of her favorite things: women’s empowerment, Midwestern populism, spectacle and ambiguous sexuality.—Vox Talk

Congratulations to NER contributor Trudy Lewis on her new novel The Empire Rolls. Lewis’s work has appeared in Volumes 20.1, 21.3, and 25.1-2 of NER.

 

 

our-secret-life-in-movies-21We are particularly excited to announced that NER Associate Editor J. M. Tyree has published Our Secret Life in the Movies, a collection of stories in collaboration with Michael McGriff. Film scholars Tyree and McGriff present paired short stories inspired by selected works of film. Tyree’s previous book is BFI Film Classics: Salesman (British Film Institute, 2012). His work has appeared numerous times in NER, most recently in 30.4.

“Wildly intelligent and deeply felt, Our Secret Life in the Movies gives us a fascinating look at American life, shot through an insightful and compassionate lens. After reading it, the world seems bigger. A tremendous book.” —Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

“Reading Our Secret Life in the Movies is like finding a lost frequency on the AM dial. The voices you hear in this book are strange, hypnotic, and intensely American.” —Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men

“A book of poignant and affecting beauty. Readers are presented with characters who are losing their innocence in lockstep with the changing nation they inhabit, and the end result is a book that provides great insight into both who we are and how we got this way. A remarkable achievement.” —Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter

Sheenan writes demigodshumorous and poetic prose-tales of everyday valor and agony set in the vast apartment complexes, spas, and car washes of 21st-century America. —Library Journal

We are pleased to announce the release of NER author Aurelie Sheehan’s new book, a collection of short stories entitled Demigods on Speedway. Sheehan has published two collections of short stories, Jewelery Box: A Collection of Histories, and Jack Kerouac is Pregnant, as well as two novels, History Lessons for Girls, and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects. Her story Horse, Girl, Landscape, appeared in NER 26.3.

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