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August 2020

New Books by NER Authors

August 12, 2020

“This is a jewel of a book.” —Ian McEwan

From the publisher: In 1971 Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a “visiting Latin American writer” while he attended to business in London. He agreed–and that “writer” turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Jorge Luis Borges. About whom Jay Parini knew precisely nothing. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must “see,” all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini’s eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate.

Jay Parini is a poet, biographer, and critic who has published seven novels, most notably The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film in 2009 and translated into over twenty-five languages. He is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, and the author of Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America. Listen to him read his essay “A Beer With Borges” (NER 39.1) in Episode 5 of NER Out Loud. 

Borges and Me can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


“Exacting, hilarious, and deadly . . . A writer of exhilarating freedom and daring.” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Bazaar

From the publisher: Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties–sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She’s also, secretly, haltingly, figuring her way into life as an artist. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage–with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and falling into Eric’s family life, his home. She becomes a hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only black woman who young Akila knows.

Raven Leilani‘s work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Narrative, Yale Review, Conjunctions, and the Cut, among others. She won Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest and the Matt Clark Editor’s Choice Prize, as well as short fiction prizes from Bat City Review and Blue Earth Review. Luster is her first novel. Her story “Dead Weight” appeared in NER 39.3. Read her conversation with NER fiction reader Michael Webster Thompson here. 

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


“[Quinn’s] voice is at once poetic and scientific—exactly what we need in today’s overheated world.” —David Gessner, author of Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness

From the publisher: Sign Here If You Exist explores states of being and states of mind, from the existence of God to sense of place to adoptive motherhood. In it, Jill Sisson Quinn examines how these states both disorient and anchor us as she treks through forests, along shorelines, and into lakes and rivers as well as through memories and into scientific literature. Each essay hinges on an unlikely pairing—parasitic wasps and the afterlife, or salamanders and parenthood—in which each element casts the other in an unexpectedly rich light. Quinn joins the tradition of writers such as Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Eula Biss to deliver essays that radiate from the junction of science and imagination, observation and introspection, and research and reflection.

Jill Sisson Quinn’s essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, OnEarth, and many other magazines. She has received the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Her work has been reprinted in Best American Science & Nature Writing 2011. Her first book, Deranged, was published by Apprentice House of Loyola University Maryland in 2010. A regular commentator for Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life series, she lives and writes in Scandinavia, Wisconsin. An essay from this collection, “Big Night,” appeared in NER 36.1 and was selected for the 2016 Best American Essays. 

Sign Here If You Exist can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


Matthew Baker’s mind is an oyster producing pearl after pearl. Each story in Why Visit America offers an eerie and unsettling vision of our possible future while remaining emotionally truthful and, as always, incredibly damn fun.”
—Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under

From the publisher: The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America.

 Matthew Baker is the author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures and the Edgar Award-nominated children’s novel If You Find This. He was named one of Variety‘s “10 Storytellers To Watch” and his fiction has appeared in publications including the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Conjunctions, and Best Of The Net. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City. His stories have appeared in NER issues 33.2 and 35.4. 

Why Visit America can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Jay Parini, Jill Sisson Quinn, Matthew Baker, Raven Leilani

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Jay Parini on Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark

August 14, 2018

NER 1.1 (1978)

Founding Editor Jay Parini remembers “An Interview with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark,” from NER 1.1 (1978).

One of my fondest memories dates to the summer day when I traveled with Sydney Lea and Robin Barone to visit Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark in West Wardsboro, a tiny Vermont town on the backside of Mount Stratton. The point of the journey was to interview Warren and Clark for an upcoming issue of New England Review. It was a dazzling sunny day, and we followed the complicated instructions, with the usual rural address that was without numbers or, as far as we could tell, even streets. We found their isolated house in the middle of the woods, near a deep pond. And we sat for hours on their screened-in porch and talked about everything from literature to politics. They were both such vivid talkers, and we had masses of good material to edit down. Warren was Kentucky-born and bred, and his accent remained thick, even after decades in New England. Clark, his wife of many years, was a sharp, ironic Yankee. Their combined intellectual firepower was impressive, and the resulting interview was, I think, a high point for the magazine in its earliest incarnation. I still take it from the shelf and reread it, almost four decades on.

“An Interview with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark“

BUY the BACK ISSUE (1.1)

**

Jay Parini founded New England Review in 1978, with Sydney Lea. He was Editor through volume 1 and then Advisory Editor through volume 4. He is Axinn Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College, and has published numerous novels, biographies, and collections of poems. His novels include The Passages of H. M. (2011), Benjamin’s Crossing (1997), and The Last Station (1990), and his biographies include Robert Frost: A Life (2000) and Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal (2011). He has published numerous other nonfiction books, and his New and Collected Poemswas released in 2015. His reflections on meeting Jorge Luis Borges in Scotland, “A Beer with Borges,” appears in NER 39.1 (2018).

 

 

Filed Under: 40th Anniversary: From the Vault, NER Classics, News & Notes Tagged With: Eleanor Clark, Jay Parini, Robert Penn Warren

New Books from NER Authors: March 2018

March 21, 2018

“What a gift Kazim Ali’s Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. ” —Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

From the publisher: Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress.

Kazim Ali is a poet, editor, and prose writer who teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, and Sky Ward, which won the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry.  His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. His poem “Origin Story” was published in NER 38.1.

Purchase Inquisition from Wesleyan University Press.

 

“Through the language of coding, mathematics, and musical notation, the characters in these stories analyze their worlds through ordered systems of logic that attempt to make sense of the inexplicability of grief and loss.” —Anne Valente

From the publisher: Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker’s sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person.

Matthew Baker is the author of the children’s novel If You Find This, a Booklist Top Ten Debut of 2015 and an Edgar Award Nominee for Best Juvenile Mystery. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, New England Review (“Sensei” in 35.4), Southern Review, Electric Literature, One Story, and elsewhere.

Hybrid Creatures can be purchased directly from the publisher, LSU Press.

 

 

 

“These whimsical, sincere, giddy-making stories are told with the imperative of a fabulist and the precision of a poet. Cadmium overlays syntax and character so that figures of speech and weird tropes of thought and language become solid, consequential and urgent.” —Andrew Tonkovich, Editor, Santa Monica Review

From the publisher: Michael Cadnum‘s Earthquake Murder is a collection of short fiction published in a variety anthologies and magazines in recent years and collected here for the first time. Featuring a foreword by radio and publishing force Andrew Tonkovick, these surprising, often ironic stories capture a world of danger and discovery.

Michael Cadnum is the author of thirty-five books, including the National Book Award Finalist The Book of the Lion, In a Dark Wood, Saint Peter’s Wolf, and Ghostwright. His story “Champion of the Ocean Floor” appeared in NER 20.4.

Earthquake Murder is available for purchase online.

 

 

“Sands Hall’s transcendent memoir, Flunk. Start., describes, with precise and utterly absorbing detail, her experience in the world of Scientology. But this is also astory that explores so many issues—how language is used to both illuminate and obscure, how we long for connection and meaning; it’s also a vivid portrait of how we find a place in our family and find a path through chaos. I could not put down this book—it is a triumph, a work of great honesty and insight. It is a necessary book for our time.” —Karen E. Bender, author of Refund

From the publisher: In Flunk. Start., Sands Hall chronicles her slow yet willing absorption into the Church of Scientology. Her time in the Church, the late 1970s, includes the secretive illness and death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and the ascension of David Miscavige. Hall compellingly reveals what drew her into the religion—what she found intriguing and useful—and how she came to confront its darker sides.

Sands Hall is the author of the novel, Catching Heaven, a Willa Award Finalist for Best Contemporary Fiction, and a Random House Reader’s Circle selection; and of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. She teaches at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Community of Writers, Squaw Valley, and is a Teaching Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Hall lives in Nevada City.

Flunk. Start. can be purchased from Counterpoint Press.

 

“These bracing, vulnerable poems embody the central mystery of poetry: what is riven is made whole.” —James Longenbach

From the publisher: Rest is a vivid, powerful collection examining the human cost of crossing the border. In 2010, Margaree Little was working for a humanitarian mission near Tucson when, along with a group of volunteers, she found the unidentified dead body of a man, who a medical examiner would later estimate died at least six months before. This discovery serves as the jumping-off point to a stunning, elegiac series of poems commemorating an imagined, unknown life. Anchored by Little’s keen eye and unsparing self-reflection, this collection asks us to examine how a single life can affect so many others.

Margaree Little received her BA from Brown University and MFA from Warren Wilson College. The recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and various fellowships, scholarships and residencies, Little teaches creative writing at Kenyon College.

Rest can be purchased online at UPNE Book Partners.

 

 

“Accessible and engaging, Jay Parini’s The Way of Jesus is a cross between a memoir and a travel diary, except the landscape he is exploring is his own soul. The compelling spiritual narrative that results is informed by insight, personal reflection, and wide reading. In his own words, it is all about resurrection—now.” —The Right Reverend Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter

From the publisher: A follow-up to his 2013, Jesus: The Human Face of God, this new book is part spiritual autobiography and part intellectual journey, offering an account of what Parini calls “The Christian Mind” from the viewpoint of a liberal Christian. Throughout this intensely personal guide to living a spiritual and ethical life, he explores the question of what it really means to practice Christianity and draws extensively from readings in world literature and religions, offering synthesis of his five decades of scholarship on the topic.

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015. He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H. M., and The Last Station, the last made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

The Way of Jesus can be purchased directly from the publisher, Beacon Press.

 

“There is no other contemporary voice quite like his, and I believe that, taken as a whole, Kevin Prufer’s prognostic backward gaze may someday prove to have shown us where we were going before we got there.” —Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review

From the publisher: Kevin Prufer‘s How He Loved Them sets love in a fraught, paradoxical world where bombs explode, fields burn, and armies advance. With clear, compassionate eyes, Prufer finds powerful intimacy between fathers and sons, soldiers and civilians, the living and the (sometimes un)dead.

Kevin Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. He teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University. His poem “In the Wheat Field” appeared in NER 36.1.

How He Loved Them can be purchased from Four Way Books.

 

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Earthquake Murder, Flunk. Start., How He Loved Them, Hybrid Creatures, Inquisition, Jay Parini, Kazim Ali, Kevin Prufer, Margaret Little, Matthew Baker, Michael Cadnum, rest, Sands Hall, The Way of Jesus

Jay Parini

A Beer with Borges

March 20, 2018

New nonfiction from NER 39.1

I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn’t.

“View of the Riviera” by Chuka Susan Chesney, courtesy of the Aarnun Gallery.

A writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early forties. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, “shaping.” And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them.

I called him Mr. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. “Just Borges, please.”


[Read more]

 

from NER 39.1
order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

Filed Under: News & Notes, Nonfiction Tagged With: Jay Parini, Jorge Luis Borges

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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