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July 2020

New Books by NER Authors

July 8, 2020

Support independent bookstores from home by purchasing these new titles and others from bookshop.org or from your local bookstore.

“My life stopped for two days while I read this novel. The Brightest Place in the World accomplishes what only our best art attempts… This book is a love letter to Las Vegas, the western desert, and, most of all, the mysteries of the human heart.” —Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver

From the publisher: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below and associate professor of English at Creighton University.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in many publications, including the Yale Review, Ecotone, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and Folio. His story “First Sight” appeared in NER 29.2.

The Brightest Place in the World can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


Hitchcock Blonde is a kaleidoscope of comedy and sorrow, a deep dive into the ways popular culture informs innocence and experience. Original and unforgettable.—Stephen Kuusisto author of Have Dog, Will Travel

From the publisher: A heady cocktail of sex and trauma. . . . Imagine an episodic memoir that braids together insights about Alfred Hitchcock’s movies with the narrative of a woman’s life: scenes of growing up in Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies as the daughter of a schizophrenic mother and a traveling salesman father, adolescent sexual traumas, and adult botched marriages and relationships— all refracted through the lens of ten of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic movies.

In each chapter, the narrator—an award-winning poet—trains her idiosyncratic lens on a different film and then onto the uncanny connections they conjure up from her own life. 

Sharon Dolin is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Manual for Living and Whirlwind. Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry in 2008. She is Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press and she directs Writing about Art in Barcelona. Her translations of three Gemma Gorga poems appear in NER 37.1.

Hitchcock Blonde can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


“There’s the great courage of tenderness and of hope here, and Marilyn Hacker has caught all her surprising phrasing, striking juxtapositions, and subtle syntactical legerdemain in an English that rings with the music of the original, not missing a beat, or an echo, or a bell.” —Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend

From the publisher: In this stunning addition to the Pleiades Press Translation Series, rendered in Marilyn Hacker’s innovative translation from the original French, Samira Negrouche confronts a war-torn Algeria, amidst the Arab Spring, cataloguing, in her luminary genre-bending poetry, grief, exile, and revolution. . . . These are imporant poems, and Hacker gives us the gift of reading them in English for the first time in a collected volume.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019),  and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015),  and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Other translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris. Read her forward to our Contemporary British Poets series in NER 41.2.

The Olive Trees’ Jazz can be purchased at Bookshop.org or at your local independent bookstore.


“[Hegi is] a writer at the height of her powers. I can’t think of a better way to ‘endorse’ a novel than to say I will be gifting it to my book-loving friends and family—a gift, mind you, not a loan, as I want this title in my keeper bookshelf.” —Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife

From the publisher: In the summer of 1878, the Ludwig Zirkus arrives on Nordstrand in Germany, to the delight of the island’s people. But after the show, a Hundred-Year Wave roars from the Nordsee and claims three young children. Three mothers are on the beach when it happens: Lotte, whose children are lost; Sabine, a Zirkus seamstress with her grown daughter; and Tilli, just a girl herself, who will give birth later that day at St. Margaret’s Home for Pregnant Girls. As full of joy and beauty as it is of pain, and told with the luminous power that has made Ursula Hegi a beloved bestselling author for decades, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls is a shining testament to the ways in which women hold each other up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Ursula Hegi is the author of over a dozen books, including Stones from the River, Children and Fire, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Tearing the Silence, and has received more than thirty grants and awards. She teaches in the Stony Brook MFA program and lives with her family on Long Island. Her essay “I’m Searching for a Home for Unwed Girls” on her experience writing The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls appeared in NER 36.3.

Hegi’s latest book can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


“Sadoff evokes complex philosophical ideas with a deceptive simplicity throughout. This is an accomplished addition to his impressive body of work.”—Publishers Weekly 

From the publisher: As a perennial outsider, the speaker traverses through loneliness, consumerism, and silence, until he sees his personal history as communal. It’s a quest to honor the complexity of the mind and heart over time―a quest for justice, love, and compassion. Cultural forces and conventions―repression, prejudice, power regimes― frame feelings of powerlessness, and are explored deeply in this collection.

Ira Sadoff is an award-winning and widely anthologized poet, critic, novelist and short story writer. He has taught at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He is currently the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. His work has appeared in NER ten times, as early as 1978 and most recently in NER 31.3.

Sadoff’s latest book can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

 

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Ira Sadoff, Marilyn Hacker, Sharon Dolin, Ursula Hegi

NER Classics

Ira Sadoff | Gossip

March 4, 2016

Ira Sadoff’s story, Gossip, appeared in NER 19.3 (1998):

Brigitte Bleistiftzeichnung - Heino D. Tripmacker

I can’t forget how the visiting avant-garde poet rifled our friend’s kitchen cabinets that night, inspecting the china and crystal. “This should be mine,” she said. “This should be my life.” We were house-sitting our friend’s two dogs, Adolph and Menjou, while Mileva was away for a month at Bellagio writing long, convoluted historical verse epics. Since back then my wife and I lived a few miles out of town we’d found it convenient to spend nights at Mileva’s: it seemed romantic, sleeping in someone else’s bed while she was away writing poems in Italy.

[read more]

Filed Under: NER Classics Tagged With: Gossip, Ira Sadoff, NER Classics

NER Classics | In the House of the Child | Ira Sadoff

June 5, 2015

Piano Silhouette Ira Sadoff’s story, “In the House of the Child,” appeared in NER 22.1 (2001):

I. Now the marriage bed is a nightmare: a king-size bed with a little prince in it. That’s how it feels: dark, even with the night light on in Randy’s private bedroom. Such a big house, with four bedrooms and a big deck opening out onto a field and a garden his wife had planted with flowers and herbs. He’s made a vow that no other woman will live there, live in their house. Just like that, his mind fills with dark thoughts. There are not enough magazines in the world to stop it. Not enough old movies. There are not enough bridge hands, there’s not enough golf to fill in the gulf when Randy’s sun Leo is at Quin’s apartment. Sleeping, except for dozing on and off somewhere between two and three in the morning, is out of the question. Quiet is his enemy. Even when Randy was a child, he couldn’t have enough noise in the house. Sometimes he did his homework listening to the radio with the TV on, and often he talked on the phone to whichever friend was sufficiently inert to listen. It worked. Why fix what’s not broken? Because now it was broken.

[read more]

Filed Under: NER Classics Tagged With: In the House of the Child, Ira Sadoff, NER Classics

New Books from NER Authors

June 18, 2012

Sarah Manguso 

The Guardians

“Manguso’s writing manages, in carefully honed bursts of pointed, poetic observation, to transcend the darkness and turn it into something beautiful.”—Heller McAlpin, Barnes and Noble

 

 

 

Traci Brimhall

Our Lady of the Ruins

Winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Our Lady of the Ruins tracks a group of women through their pilgrimage in a mid-apocalyptic world.  Exploring war, plagues, and the search for a new God in exile, these poems create a chorus of wanderers haunted by empire, God, and personal trauma.

“…part Dylan Thomas, part saint’s legend and part Tolkien.” —Publishers Weekly Review

 

Lucia Perillo

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

“Lucia Perillo isn’t just a strikingly original poet; she’s a top-notch fiction writer as well. The stories in this bleakly funny and harrowing collection are reminiscent of both Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, but the vision than animates them is Perillo’s own, unique and unmistakable.” —Tom Perrotta

 

 

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

“Perillo’s poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions.”—Booklist

 

 

Ira Sadoff

True Faith

“Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation.”–Gerald Stern

 

 

 

Charles Holdefer

Back in the Game

“(Holdefer’s) funny novel describes a maturing pro athlete’s often bumpy transition from youthful dreams to mainstream American life.” —Publisher’s Weekly

 

 

Paisley Rekdal

Animal Eye

“Paisley Rekdal’s quiet virtuosity with rhyme and cadence, her syntactic fidelity to thought and sensation, her analytical intelligence that keeps homing in and in, her ambitious sentences and larger formal structures that try to embody with absolute accuracy the difference between what we ought to feel and what we really do feel—all these make her unique in her generation . . .”—Tom Sleigh

 

Michael Heller

This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010

From his early spare poems written in Spain to the recent ruminative work exploring language, tradition (often Jewish and diasporic) and the self, this book collects four decades of Michael Heller’s “tone perfect poems” as George Oppen described them. Enriched with the detailed landscapes of the phenomenal world and mind, This Constellation Is a Name confirms Michael Heller’s place at the forefront of contemporary American poetry.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, NER Community Tagged With: Animal Eye, Back in the Game, Charles Holdefer, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, Ira Sadoff, Lucia Perillo, Michael Heller, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, Our Lady of the Ruins, Paisley Rekdal, Sarah Manguso, The Guardians, This Constellation Is a Name, Traci Brimhall, True Faith


Vol. 43, No. 2

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NER Digital

David Ryan

Behind the Byline

David Ryan

NER’s Elizabeth Sutton speaks with 43.2 contributor David Ryan about juxtaposition, character development, and writing around gaps in his story “Elision.”

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