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“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.
Ira Sadoff’s story, “In the House of the Child,” appeared in NER 
