“A complex but emotionally effective tribute to the Irish author.” –Kirkus Reviews
From the publisher: A baseball game. Officially sanctioned torture. A chance encounter at a bar. A conversation between a parent and child. News reports of terrorist attacks.
These—plus a meditation on the transformative power of the undying work of Samuel Beckett—make up the interwoven strands of this short work by poet and critic Michael Coffey. Written according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray,” of which only six manuscript pages exist, this rhythm of themes and genres comprises a complex, mesmerizing work of fiction that has its roots in reality.
Michael Coffey received his BA in English at the University of Notre Dame and an MA from Leeds University in Anglo-Irish Literature. Former co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly, he has published three books of poems, a collection of short stories, a book about baseball’s perfect games, and co-edited a book about Irish immigration to America. Samuel Beckett is Closed can be purchased online through OR Books.
From the publisher: A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically admired poets.
Publishers Weekly has starred the review for Phillips’s fourteenth collection, Wild Is the Wind: “. . . These 35 poems are as haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named . . . As ever in his work, emotional dynamics resist easy resolution and the speakers unsparingly evaluate both the self and exterior world.”
Carl Phillips is the winner of the PEN Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work is forthcoming in NER 39.1. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Wild Is the Wind can be purchased directly from the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
From the publisher: A reckless wager between a tennis pro with a fading career and a drunken party guest—the stakes are an antique motorcycle and an heiress’s diamond necklace—launches a narrative odyssey that braids together three centuries of aspiration and adversity. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young writer soon to make his mark turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport’s earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited.
In The Maze at Windermere Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a brilliant tapestry, charting a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.
Gregory Blake Smith is the award-winning author of four novels, including The Maze at Windermere and The Divine Comedy of John Venner, a New York Times Notable Book. His short story collection, The Law of Miracles, won the Juniper Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. He has received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Smith is currently the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.
The Maze at Windermere can be purchased directly from the publisher, Viking (Random House).
