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.
Tonino’s infectious love of the outdoors…should inspire us to explore the places just outside our own front door. —E/The Environmental Magazine
From the publisher: At eighteen, Vermont native Leath Tonino ventured west to attend college in Colorado. Upon hearing his destination, many of Tonino’s friends and family predicted that he’d never come back; he’d make the “land of endless space and sky, its ranges and their storms” his home. “The West will swallow you,” one said, in a tone that felt like part warning and part prophecy.
More than a decade later Tonino continues to call Vermont his home. But despite his love of New England and his admiration for writers who sing the praises of their native ground, he concedes that he is, as Gary Snyder once phrased it, “promiscuous with landscapes.” Tonino has spent the intervening years since college traversing “the alphabet of the American West from AZ to CA to UT to WY” and writing about its mysterious and powerful beauty. The resulting musings are collected in The West Will Swallow You, the title of which is a nod to words that, in many ways, turned out to be true.
Leath Tonino, a writer from Vermont, has also worked as a wildlife biologist in Arizona, a blueberry farmer in New Jersey, and a snow shoveler in Antarctica. His essays, reported stories, and interviews appear in magazines such as Outside, Men’s Journal, Orion, Tricycle, Utne Reader, The Sun, and NER 33.3, and his essay “Beach Reading” was recently featured on NER Digital.
The West Will Swallow You can be purchased from Trinity University Press or from your local bookstore.
From the publisher: Erich Ambrose fools people for a living. It’s a family tradition. But when a party stunt goes disastrously wrong, he finds himself in deep trouble, on the run through Chicago streets and northern woods, matching wits with the FBI and national security agents and money launderers, all while trying to please a violent homecoming queen and a badass rabbit. Humorous and probing, Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots is a story of how our past haunts the present, and how the cruelest tricks are the ones we play on ourselves.
Chalres Holdefer, author of five novels, including Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast (2019) and Dick Cheney in Shorts (2017), 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, and his story “The Raptor” won a Pushcart Prize. His essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism” was published in NER 32.3, and his short story “Big and Nasty” appeared in NER 37.1.
Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots can be purchased at SPD Books or your local independent bookseller.
“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.
Here is a vast, courageous text investigating race, separation, the molecules of space, the love of his man, and many other parts of this Living Universe in an entirely fresh and exhilarating perspective. Here is the harmony I have been seeking. —CAConrad
From the publisher: In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called “Secret Piece,” an open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak. Beginning with this invitation to creation, and using essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali marks a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, the challenges of literary translation and of climate change, and destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid shards from far-flung histories and geographies he finds the cosmos.
Kazim Ali is author of eighteen previous books, including poetry, novels, memoirs, and translations. Born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent, he grew up in Canada and the U.S. and now teaches at Oberlin College.
Silver Road can be purchased directly from the publisher, Tupelo Press.
The Poetics of Tenderness hopes to turn the discussion of sexuality around—to substitute for ideas and figures of violence and predation much older and more durable associations of sex and love with care, affection, beauty, memory, worthiness and ideality . . . Poetics of Tenderness implicitly urges us to think a little better of one another.” —Robert Cantwell
From the publisher: A literary-critical essay on love, grounded in the developmental theory of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and shaped by recent work on the neurobiology and anthropology of love. Calling upon Andreus Capellanus, Plato, Schopenhauer, Freud, William James, Hardy, Dreiser and Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence and Tom Stoppard, among others . . . it argues for a resurrection of tenderness and holds out the possibility that love may yet be a source of sweetness and light.
Robert Cantrell has taught English and American Literature at Kenyon College, Georgetown University, and the Universities of Iowa and Exeter. His books include Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of old Southern Sound, Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, and If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is now professor emeritus of American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill.
The Poetics of Tenderness can be purchased directly from its publisher, Rowman & Littlefield.
Night Unto Night by Martha Collins finds common ground between such contradictions as beauty and horror, for and morality, the personal and the political. Collins suggests that dissonance is a permanent state, something to be occupied rather than solved. — Publisher’s Weekly
From the publisher: How can one reconcile the irreconcilable? In this masterful companion to Day Unto Day, Martha Collins finds common ground between contradictions—beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political. These poems are powerfully alive, speaking to and revising each other, borrowing a word or a line before turning it on end. We are doomed to repeat mistakes, seasons, wars, words. Yet redemption beckons, too, in the persistence of empathy and love.
Martha Collins is the author of numerous collections of poems, most recently Night Unto Night and its companion, Day Unto Day. She has also published four collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry, including Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap (with the author). She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.
Night Unto Night can be purchased directly from the publisher, Milkweed Editions.
Literary criticism, at least of a kind, meets literary memoir in this airy essay by novelist Holdefer. It’s an eyewitness account of how one writer found sustenance in another writer. — Kirkus Reviews
From the publisher: George Saunders’ Pastoralia is an exaggerated dystopia of late capitalist America, merging the spirit of James Thurber with the world of the Simpsons. In his entry in Ig’s acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-winning author Charles Holdefer addresses how Saunders captures the pain and absurdity of the American service sector, and does justice to the dignity of the people who struggle there.
Charles Holdefer has published four novels with the Permanent Press. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines, including the New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, Slice, and Yellow Silk. His story The Raptor won a Pushcart Prize in 2016. Holdefer 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.
George Saunders’ Pastoralia can be purchased directly from the publisher, Ig publishing.
Lee’s stillness and clarity alone, based on their rarity in contemporary poetry, make this a collection worth having. Add to that the depth of history, memory, and familial trauma and one is left with a stunning addition to an oeuvre already widely and deservedly appreciated. —Trevor Ketner, Junior Library Guild
From the publisher: The Undressing is a tonic for spiritual anemia; it attempts to uncover things hidden since the dawn of the world. Short of achieving that end, these mysterious, unassuming poems investigate the human violence and dispossession increasingly prevalent around the world, as well as the horrors the poet grew up with as a child of refugees. Lee draws from disparate sources, including the Old Testament, the Dao De Jing, and the music of the Wu Tang Clan. While the ostensive subjects of these layered, impassioned poems are wide-ranging, their driving engine is a burning need to understand our collective human mission.
Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia. His verse has earned numerous honors, including a Lannan Literary Award, a Paterson Poetry Prize, and an American Book Award. Lee lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.
The Undressing can be purchased from its publisher, W. W. Norton & Company.
Richly depicting emotional interiority of its characters, Raeff’s novel reveals how the devastating effects of war and hidden secrets can impact lives across decades.—Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: Winter Kept Us Warm is an evocative story of family, strained by the cruelty of war and its generational repercussions. A novel of the heart, filled to the brim with unforgettable characters stitching together the deep threads of love, friendship, loyalty, and, of course, loss.
Anne Raeff‘s short story collection, The Jungle Around Us, won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was a finalist for the California Book Award and named one of the 100 Best Books of 2016 by San Francisco Chronicle. Her stories and essays have appeared in Zyzzyva and Guernica, among other places. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats.
Winter Kept Us Warm can be purchased from Counterpoint Press and independent booksellers.
Sotelo explores the power of mythologizing personal history in her striking debut . . . and from the start [she cultivates intimacy through moments of vulnerability . . . With humanity and raw honesty, Sotelo finds fresh ways to approach romance, family, and more. —Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman . . . Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, how “far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go.”
Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets.
Analicia Sotelo is the author of the chapbook Nonstop Godhead, selected by Rigoberto González and published by the Poetry Society of America in 2016. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Antioch Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. The 2016 Disquiet International Literary Prize winner in Poetry, she is the recipient of scholarships from Squaw Valley and Image Text Ithaca. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston.
Virgin can be purchased online from Milkweed Editions.
Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation’s emerging pathology and sensibility. —John Ashbery, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
From the publisher: The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that weave in and out of a burlesque purgatory where the living pay—dearly, with both money and conscience—to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: “$20 for five minutes. I’ll hold your hand in my own,” one ghost says. “I’ll tell you you were good to me.” Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life. With a nod to her grandmother Ruth Stone’s poem “The Möbius Strip of Grief,” Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.
Bianca Stone is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2014). She lives with her husband, the poet Ben Pease, and their daughter, Odette, in Goshen, Vermont.
The Möbius Strip Club of Grief can be purchased from Tin House or your independent bookseller.