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October 2020

New Books by NER Authors

October 28, 2020

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.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Charles Holdefer, Eugene Mirabelli, Jan Beatty, Natasha Trethewey

New Books by NER Authors

December 6, 2016

Against Sunset by Stanley PlumlyA powerful new volume from the National Book Award finalist that demonstrates how the lyric is essentially elegiac. —W.W. Norton & Company

Congratulations to NER author Stanley Plumly on his new book Against Sunset: Poems. As much an homage to the rich tradition of the Romantics as it is a meditation on memory itself, the poems live at the edges of disappearances.

Plumly is the author of many volumes of poetry, including Old Heart, the winner of 2007’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A finalist for the National Book Award, he is also the author of The Immortal Evening and Posthumous Keats. Stanley Plumly lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Plumly’s essay Does Ripe Fruit Never Fall? appeared in NER 37.1, and his poetry appeared most recently in NER 37.3.

Against Sunset: Poems will be available from W.W. Norton & Company on November 8th.

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imaginary vesselsCompelling, appealing, cinematic . . . Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world. —The Boston Globe

Paisley Rekdal celebrates the release of her newest book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, a Publishers Weekly “Most Anticipated Book” of Fall 2016. Through formally inventive lyrics and sonnet sequences, Rekdal’s bold new collection investigates how public identities and monuments become sites for our emotional re-enactments of history.

Rekdal is the author of an extensive body of work: a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography entitled Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and NER 34.3-4 with her poem When It Is Over It Will Be Over.

Imaginary Vessels is available from Copper Canyon Press and other booksellers.

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raa-smallFor anyone who loves the work of James Salter or William Trevor, Eugene Mirabelli is another writer to treasure, and Renato After Alba is one of the best books I’ve read in ages—a beautiful, profound and exhilarating novel about what sustains us in the face of inevitable loss. —Elizabeth Hand, author of Hard Light and Generation Loss

Ten years after the conclusion of Renato Stillamare’s defiant confessions in Renato, the Painter, Alba, Renato’s beloved wife of fifty years, dies without warning, and the blow leaves him in pieces. When Renato resumes his narrative, this larger-than-life artist has been reduced to a gray existence of messy confusion—broken belief, crazy hope, desperate philosophy. A man of fragments but still an artist, he assembles a collage of scenes of life with and without Alba, recollections of his eccentric Sicilian-American family, encounters with well-meaning friends, daily attempts at resuming his former life, and metaphysical railings against any deity capable of destroying what it has created.

Eugene Mirabelli is the author of eight previous novels, as well as numerous articles, reviews, short stories, and interviews. He has received a Rockefeller Foundation Award, was co-founder and co-director of the Alternative Literary Programs in the Schools, and is a professor emeritus of the State University of New York at Albany. An excerpt of his novel Renato After Alba appears in NER 37.1. It is available from McPherson & Co. and independent booksellers.

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Contradictions in the Design is a firehouse of a book—heaven-bent and relieved toward elemental mysteries that it resists and celebrates. Telegraphing the factories of Detroit, our familiar and strange American homes, the vast Blue Ridge, Olzmann guides us toward a hard-earned gratefulness that can exist when in the presence of impossible questions.   —Sarah Gambito

Olzmann‘s first book of poems, Mezzanines, received the 2011 Kundiman Prize (Alice James Books). He is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College. He has appeared in NER 35.3 and 30.4. Contradictions in the Design, Olzmann’s second collection of poetry, can be purchased from Alice James Books and other booksellers.

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wayward

Wayward Heroes brims with foreign names, Icelandic glyphs, and esoteric references that might otherwise distance readers from the story, but Roughton doesn’t allow any of it to get in the way: The beauty of Laxness’ gray, severe novel is rendered into the breed of elegant English that one might find in translations of The Iliad or Beowulf. It’s this excellent translation that allows Wayward Heroes to find relevance with contemporary readers and ring true — politically and socially — as it did in 1955 and medieval Iceland. —Taylor Kang, author of The Culture Trip

From the publisher: Published in 1952, Halldór Laxness’s Wayward Heroes can safely be said to be quite unlike any other work of modern literature. It is based on medieval Icelandic sagas—primarily the Saga of the Fosterbrothers and Snorri Sturluson’s treatment of the Norwegian saint-king Olaf Haraldsson— and is written in the style and language of those sagas. This reworking of Iceland’s ancient tales, set against a backdrop of the medieval Norse world, complete with Viking raids, battles enshrined in skaldic lays, saints’ cults, clashes between secular and spiritual authorities, journeys to faraway lands and abodes of trolls, legitimate claimants and pretenders to thrones, was written during the post-WWII buildup to the Cold War, and Laxness uses it as a vehicle for a critique of global militarism and belligerent national posturing that was as rampant then as now.

Philip Roughton was born in the US and lives in Iceland. His translation of Halldór Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell received the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2001 and second prize in the 2000 BCLA John Dryden Translation Competition. Excerpts from his translation of Wayward Heroes won the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2015 while his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for book-length literary translations in 2016. He was recently awarded an NEA Translation Grant for 2017. An excerpt of his translation of Laxness’s The Great Weaver from Kashmir appeared in NER 29.3.

Wayward Heroes is available from Archipelago Books and independent booksellers.

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sobbingschool9780143111863At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. . . . Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable. – Tracy K. Smith

Selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, The Sobbing School is NER author Joshua Bennett‘s “mesmerizing debut collection of poetry.” Deemed by Gloria as “an essential book for our times,” Bennett’s collection presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

Bennett’s titular poem “The Sobbing School” was published in NER 36.2, with other works published or forthcoming in Anti-, Blackbird, Callaloo, Obsidian, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University and has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and the Ford Foundation. He is winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prizes. Bennett is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

The Sobbing School is available now from Penguin Random House and independent booksellers.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: Eugene Mirabelli, Joshua Bennett, Matthew Olzmann, Paisley Rekdal, Stanley Plumly

Eugene Mirabelli

Oh, My Beautiful Alba

March 31, 2016

Fiction from NER 37.1

 

From the novel Renato After Alba

I went to the Daily Grind café and had a cup of coffee at the little table where we often sat, but Alba didn’t turn up, smiling and saying “I thought I’d find you here.”

Because she is dead—I know, I know. What I don’t know is where she went and why she hasn’t come back and is she someplace I can get to without dying, because though I wanted to die and told myself over and over to die, it became clear it wasn’t going to happen right away. I don’t understand why we’re born or why we love or why we bring children into the world if we and everyone we love are going to die.

—♦

I was born at my grandfather’s house in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the evening of the last snowfall of March, eighty-three years ago. You could say I was born a few days earlier, but on that snowy evening I was found in a laundry basket on my grandfather’s doorstep, so that’s my true birthday. My grandfather’s big square house was on one side of St. Brigid’s Church, and the small narrow parish house was on the other side. Everyone said I had been brought to the wrong door, but maybe my guardian angel directed the delivery to this address so that a newly married couple at the table that evening could adopt me and be my true parents, as did happen.

My grandfather’s name was Pacifico Cavallù and there were fifteen people in the house that night. He was at the head of the table, a sturdy man with a short, iron-colored beard, and his wife Marianna sat opposite him, a glorious woman such as you find carved on the prow of an old sailing ship. Their children, handsome and headstrong, were seated on both sides of the long table—Lucia and Marissa and Bianca and Candida and Dante and Sandro and Silvio and Mercurio and Regina, along with Marissa’s husband Nicolo, an aeronautical engineer, and Bianca’s husband Fidèle, a stonecutter. And, of course, there was Carmela the cook and Nora the housemaid. That’s two in the kitchen, thirteen at the table, and me in a laundry basket being set down quietly on the piazza.

Then came that KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK, so Pacifico got up from the table, his linen napkin still tucked into the top of his vest, and strolled through the grand front hall and into the vestibule to open the front door. Good God! he cries. At the table they drop their silverware and knock over chairs to come running and I am born.

[Read more]

Eugene Mirabelli was born in 1931 and his first novel was published in 1959. Renato After Alba, excerpted in this issue of NER and forthcoming from McPherson & Company in October, is a follow-up to his novel Renato, the Painter (McPherson, 2012). These are the last two in a series of six novels concerning Renato and the Cavallù clan. Mirabelli has published other novels, including science-fiction and fantasy, and his stories, novels, and essays have been translated into many languages. He writes about politics, economics, and science on his blog, criticalPages.com. 

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Eugene Mirabelli, Oh My Beautiful Alba, Renato After Alba


Vol. 43, No. 4

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Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

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