New England Review

New Books from NER Authors

31x688yc99L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Mesmerizing and beautiful in the language and rhythms of his pen. ―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

We congratulate NER contributor Reginald Dwayne Betts on the recent release of his poetic collection Bastards of the Reagan Era (Stahlecker Selections). His work appeared in NER 35.5.

Regniald Dwayne Bett’s Shahid Reads His Own Palm won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. He is a Yale Law student.

Bastards of the Reagan Era is available from independent booksellers.

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41Nam6YLaYL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period’s most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter . . . Dazzling. —David Wojahn, Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa

We are also pleased to announce Komunyakaa‘s collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. He teaches at New York University.

The Emperor of Water Clocks is available from independent booksellers.

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51cX2y5gkLL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy.—Publishers Weekly

NER is pleased to announce the publication of Linda Gregerson‘s first book of collected work, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books). Gregerson’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently NER 31.4.

Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.

Prodigal is available from independent booksellers.

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513YIrt8CZL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_Shards of elegy, lament, intermittent flashes of wit, a philosophical sensuality throughout: this is subtle, sophisticated, gorgeous, and unsettling work by a poet open to being ‘torn by the lyric’ as well as history. Sze-Lorrain aims ‘to honor / the invisible,’ ‘to get silence right’: she does. —Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets

Fiona Sze-Lorrain‘s The Ruined Elegance: Poems has been published by Princeton University Press. Her work appears in NER 35.2.

Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell, writes of Ruined Elegance: “The luminous art of Sze-Lorrain reveals how imaginative vision requires the veil. Hers is a contemporary, polycultural poetry, a language of distance and silence, rich with suggestion. The disparate, brilliant images of her Ruined Elegance fend off narrative, ‘torn by the lyric,’ whose instrument is more enduring than its players: its ‘strings stayed taut. None / broke. Her fingernails did.'”

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist. The author of two previous books of poetry in English, My Funeral Gondola and Water the Moon, she also writes and translates in French and Chinese. She lives in Paris.

The Ruined Elegance: Poems is available from Princeton University Press and independent booksellers.

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5159SYcAF2L._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_Whether in praise songs, appraisals, or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace . . . The result is an extraordinary and ultimately irreducible debut. —Terrance Hayes, judge

Rickey Laurentiis has released his latest collection, Boy with Thorn, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Laurentiis’s work appeared in NER‘S Volume 36.2.

Laurentiis, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Boy with Thorn is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press and independent booksellers.

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A superbly personal biography that pulsates with intelligence, scholarship, and heart. —Kirkus Review

NER is pleased to announce that founding editor Jay Parini’s Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 3.44.34 PMEmpire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal was recently published with Doubleday Books. Parini’s work, including “An Interview with Gore Vidal” (NER 14.1), has appeared in multiple NER issues.

Parini has published over two dozen books, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Last Station, Robert Frost: A Life, and The Apprentice Lover. He is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. He has received honorary degrees from Lafayette College and the University of Scranton. Currently, Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College.

Parini’s access to Vidal and his thoughtful reflections on him establish this as the definitive biography of a major writer. — Publisher’s Weekly. 

Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal is available from Doubleday Books and independent booksellers.

 

New Books from NER Authors

The fluidity with which Barot walks this difficult line between meaning and certainty makes these poems feel more born than made. This is a fantastic book.—Bob Hicok 

Rick Barot, poetry editor for New England Review since fall 2014, has recently published a new book of poetry, Chord (Sarabande Books).

“Barot demonstrates his mastery of image throughout this collection of meditative, personal poems in which language is a boat that ‘cuts the water, like scissors/into fabric.’ At his best, Barot seamlessly weaves history, image, and etymology in ways that offer the reader new eyes to see language and the world it describes.”            —Publishers Weekly

Barot has also published The Darker Fall (2002), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, and more.

Chord is available from Sarabande Books and independent booksellers.

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Bayer tells a taut, gritty tale that gives a fresh and revealing insight into the Soviet Union of the Khrushchev years. —William Ryan, author of The Holy Thief, The Darkening Field, and The Twelfth Department.

410O1v-fdrL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_Congratulations to Alexei Bayer on his new mystery novel, The Latchkey Murders, a prequel to the first novel in the series “Murder at the Dacha” (Russian Information Services, Inc). Bayer’s short stories have appeared in NER 19.4, 26.1, and 31.2.

From the publisher: “A serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow, rattling the foundations of the communist state (such anti-social crimes only occur in decadent bourgeois societies, after all). The victims are as pitifully innocent as the crimes are grievous . . .”

Bayer lives in New York and is a writer and translator in both English and Russian. His short fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, Chtenia, and New England Review.

The Latchkey Murders is available from Russian Life and independent booksellers.

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The collection demonstrates Beattie’s craftsmanship, precise language, and her knack for revealing psychological truths.  —Publishers Weekly

UnknownNew England Review contributor Ann Beattie has published a new collection of short stories, The State We’re In: Maine Stories (Scribner). Beattie’s fiction appeared in NER‘s very first issue (1978).

“The 15 loosely connected stories in Beattie’s latest collection, set on Maine’s southern coast, feature drifting adults and their rootless offspring at seemingly unimportant moments that are in fact critical.”                 —Publishers Weekly

Beattie has received the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her stories, and has been included in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century and four O. Henry Award collections. She is currently the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

The State We’re In is available from Powell’s Books and independent booksellers.

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For years Gregerson has been one of poetry’s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality  —Chicago Tribune

Unknown-1New England Review is pleased to announce the publication of Linda Gregerson‘s new collection of poetry, Prodigal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Many of Gregerson’s poems have appeared in NER, most recently “Theseus Forgetting” in 31.4.

From the publisher: “Prodigal [ranges] broadly in subject from class in America to our world’s ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood to the intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond . . . A brilliant stylist, known for her formal experiments as well as her perfected lines, Gregerson is a poet of great vision. Here, the growth of her art and the breadth of her interests offer a snapshot of a major poet’s intellect in the midst of her career.”

Linda Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as in New England Review, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.

Prodigal is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and from independent booksellers.

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Binding together and moving through this delectable collection there’s a mystery, the one that makes you keep turning the pages . . . —Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex

Mitchell-ViralEmily Mitchell has published her new collection of stories, Viral (W. W. Norton).

From the publisher: “The characters in these stories find that the world they thought they knew has shifted and changed, become bizarre and disorienting, and, occasionally, miraculous. Told with absurdist humor and sweet sadness, Viral is about being lost in places that are supposed to feel like home.”

Mitchell’s stories have appeared in many magazines, including Harper’s and Ploughshares. Three of the stories from this collection first appeared in NER: “Lucille’s House” (28.2), “On Friendship” (31.3), and “Three Marriages” (34.2). She teaches at the University of Maryland.

Viral is available from Powell’s Books and independent booksellers.

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New Books from NER Writers: The Selvage

From the jacket copy of Linda Gregerson’s new book, The Selvage: “In eloquent poems about Ariadne, Theseus, and Dido, the death of a father, and a bombing raid in Lebanon, and in a magnificent series detailing Masaccio’s Brancacci frescoes, The Selvage deftly traces the ‘line between’ the ‘wonder and woe’ of human experience. Keenly attuned to the precariousness of our existence in a fractured world–of ‘how little the world will spare us’–Gregerson explores the cruelty of human and political violence, such as the recent island massacre in Norway and ‘the current nightmare’ of war and terrorism. And yet, running as a ‘counterpoint’ to violence and cruelty is ‘The reigning brilliance / of the genome and / the risen moon…,’ ‘The / arachnids exoskeleton. The kestrels eye.’ The Selvage is the boldest evidence yet that Linda Gregerson’s unique combination of dramatic lyricism and fierce intelligence transcends current fashions to claim an enduring place in American poetry.”

Linda Gregerson is a National Book Award finalist and Kingsley Tufts Award winner, and her work has appeared in NER since 1982 (4.4), and most recently in 2011 (31.4). You can hear her read from this new book in our Bread Loaf Audio Series.

Linda Gregerson Reading at Bread Loaf

Linda Gregerson reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

“The Selvage” was originally published in Poetry

The Selvage

“Her Argument for the Existence of God” was originally published in PN Review (UK).

Her Argument for the Existence of God

This reading took place August 11, 2010.

To listen to the entire reading, or to other readings and lectures from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, visit their iTunesU site.

Linda Gregerson’s books of poetry include Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award; and Fire in the Conservatory (1982). She is also the author of literary criticism, including Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (2001) and The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (1995).

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