New Books from NER Authors

July 2020

July 30, 2020

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

“The resolute heart and keen human insights found everywhere in After the Body: New and Selected Poems renew the ‘claim’ many readers of contemporary American poetry have made for decades, that Cleopatra Mathis is one of our most important and essential poets.”
—Michael Collier, former poet laureate of Maryland and author of Dark Wild Realm

From the publisher: After the Body charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece. Through close and relentless observation of her own physical being, Mathis shows us how miniscule ambition, planning, and a sense of control over our own bodies are—things we so blithely take as real and solid when healthy.

Cleopatra Mathis is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including What to Tip the Boatman?, winner of the 2001 Jane Kenyon Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tri-Quarterly, Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Since 1982, she has taught at Dartmouth College, where she directs the creative writing program. Her work has appeared in NER multiple times, most recently in NER 32.2.

After the Body can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“This is a book I know I needed as a young brown girl; it’s a book I didn’t know I needed, still. Reyes’s collection is a gathering place, a site of survival.”―Michelle Peñaloza, author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire

From the publisher: Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned BS detector. The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with being constantly told how foreign and unattractive and unwanted she is. She’s flipping tables and throwing chairs. She’s raising her voice. She’s keeping a sharp focus on the violences committed against her every day, and she’s writing through the depths of her “otherness” to find beauty and even grace amidst her rage. Simultaneously looking into the mirror and out into the world, Reyes exposes the sensitive nerve-endings of life under patriarchy as a visible immigrant woman of color as she reaches towards her unflinching center.

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of five previous collections of poetry: Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2006), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA, 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, To Love as Aswang (PAWA, Inc. Publications, 2015), and Invocation to Daughters (City Lights, 2017). She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, California. Her poem “Brown Girl Mixtape” appeared in NER 39.4.

Letters To a Young Brown Girl can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Solie’s powers of description have never been so acute, her senses so greedy . . . Solie would deny that she works miracles. I beg to differ.” — Ange Mlinko, Special to the New York Review of Books

From the publisher: In the seventh century, on the coast of Fife, Scotland, an Irish missionary named Ethernan withdrew to a cave in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island, directly opposite, in the Firth of Forth, or pursue a hermit’s solitude. His decision would have been informed by the realities of war, religious colonization, and ideas of progress, power, and corruption, and complicated by personal interest, grief, confusion, and a faith (religious and secular) under extreme duress. Karen Solie’s fifth book of poetry, The Caiplie Caves, attends to transition in times of crisis. Around passages informed by Ethernan’s story are poems that orbit the geographical location of the caves but that range through the ages, addressing violence, power, work, economies, self-delusion, and belief. Indecision and necessity are inseparable companions. As are the prospect of error and regret.

Karen Solie is the author of four previous collections of poetry. Short Haul Engine won the BC Book Prize Dorothy Livesay Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. Modern and Normal was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize. Pigeon won the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize, and The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, published in the UK, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. An associate director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program, she edits and teaches and has served as writer-in-residence for universities across Canada and in Scotland. She lives in Toronto. Read her poem “Stinging Nettle Appreciation” in NER 39.3.

The Caiplie Caves can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Like all the best literature, Artifact leaves you feeling as if you’ve been through a major life experience and you’re stronger for it.” —Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens

From the publisher: Artifact is the dazzling, half-century-spanning story of biologist Lottie Kristin. Born in Michigan in the early 1940s to a taciturn mother and embittered father, Lottie is independent from the start, fascinated with the mysteries of nature and the human body. By age sixteen, she and her sweetheart, cheerful high school sports hero Charlie Hart, have been through a devastatingly traumatic pregnancy. When an injury ends Charlie’s football career four years later, the two move to Texas hoping for a fresh start.

Bravely and wisely written, Artifact is an intimate and propulsive portrait of a whole woman, a celebration of her refusal to be defined by others’ imaginations, and a meditation on the glorious chaos of biological life.

Arlene Heyman was born in the United States, in Newark, New Jersey. She graduated from Bennington College in Vermont. The year after graduation she spent writing short stories in Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship, and then returned to the US, to Syracuse University, where she received an MFA. For six years, while publishing short stories in the New American Review and other literary magazines, she taught freshman English and World Literature at community colleges in Upstate New York. She went on to become a physician (MD from University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia), and then fell in love with psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She lives in Manhattan, where she is in private practice and writes fiction. Her fiction appears in NER 37.1.

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

“Ragtime in a fever dream. . . . When you mix 19th-century racists, feminists, misogynists, freaks, and a flim-flam man, the spectacle that results might bear resemblance to the contemporary United States.” ―Library Journal (starred review)

From the publisher: In the seventh stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Ellen Finch, former stenographer to Henry James, recalls her time as an assistant to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, heroes of America’s woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P. T. Barnum’s circus “eccentrics.” When her infant son is kidnapped by the Klan, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable suffragists travel aboard Barnum’s train from New York to Memphis to rescue the baby from certain death at the fiery cross.

A savage yet farcical tale, American Follies explores the roots of the women’s rights movement, its relationship to the fight for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of today.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. Lock has appeared in NER several times, “A Theory of the Self” his most recent contribution in NER 34.2.

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

“With a fierce and elegant intelligence, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. has made herself present within the most spectacularly deadly landscape in modernity.”—Joseph Donahue, author of The Copper Scroll

From the publisher: In the foreword to her book-length poem Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” Over the course of several decades, Gray tracked the contours and traces of the Ypres Salient, walking the haunted battlefield ground of the contemporary landscape with campaign maps in hand, reading “not only history, poetry, and fiction, but also unit diaries; contemporary reports and individual accounts; survey information and maps of all kinds; treatises on aerial photography and artillery tactics; and manuals on field engineering and tactical planning.” Out of this material, through a process of collage, convergence, and ritual chöd visualization, Gray has composed a spare, fascinating, lyrical engagement with the Missing, in shell hole and curved trench, by way of amulets and obstacles. What is salient rises from the secret signs in song, like a blessing, protected from harm.

Elizabeth T. Gray Jr., born in Boston, Massachusetts, is the author of the poetry collection Series | India. Her celebrated translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Díwán of Hafiz, The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Díwán of Hafiz, and Iran: Poems of Dissent. Her poem “Devi: The Goddess” appeared in NER 35.1.

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

July 2019

NER Author Books

July 17, 2019

“Extraordinary . . . I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly as Three Women.” —Elizabeth Gilbert

From the publisher: Desire as we’ve never seen it before: a riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts, destroys our lives, and it’s all we live for. Yet we almost never speak of it. And as a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now. Over the past eight years, journalist Lisa Taddeo has driven across the country six times to embed herself with ordinary women from different regions and backgrounds. The result, Three Women, is the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written and one of the most anticipated books of the year.

Lisa Taddeo has contributed to New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour, and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Political Writing anthologies, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband and daughter in New England. Her story “Forty-Two” was published in NER 36.1 and featured in the NER Out Loud live event.

Three Women can be purchased through the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

From the publisher: In Poetry and Time, [Max] Neumann’s haunting images are accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of poems, stating: “They know what it is they do, but do not say it.” Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson, Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of transience and mortality at the center of poems’ reasons for being, their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being inextricably bound to time. Sartorius’s ruminations beautifully complement Neumann’s series of thirty poignant paintings, making this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations were featured in NER 37.3.

Poetry and Time can be purchased from the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

From the publisher: Time Inside, Gary Margolis’s seventh book of poems, takes us behind the walls, through the metal gates of his experience leading a poetry workshop for inmates in a maximum security correctional facility, and back out to the surrounding worlds of love’s nature and memory’s hold and release of us. Emblematic of Margolis’s writing, sometimes in phrases, sometimes in sentences, Margolis always has an ear for a line’s turning. Each poem finds its centering image that arrests the heart. With clarity, humor, and a counselor’s and poet’s eye, Margolis sees the keys and latches of dark and light inside our time.

An award-winning poet and counselor, Gary Margolis is Emeritus Executive Director of College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College. He was a Robert Frost and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow and has taught at the University of Tennessee, Vermont, Bread Loaf, and Green Mountain Writers’ Conferences. His poem “The Interview” was featured on National Public Radio’s The Story, and after the 2004 World Series he read his poem “Winning the Lunar Eclipse” on Boston’s ABC Channel 5. His poem “In Audubon’s Notebook” was featured in NER 23.1.

Time Inside can be purchased through the publisher or from your local independent bookstore.

“This spectacular work will delight and awe readers with Lock’s magisterial wordsmithing.”— Library Journal (starred review)

From the publisher: In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873–79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab’s, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant’s Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city. Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Lock has appeared in NER several times, “A Theory of the Self” his most recent contribution in NER 34.2.

Feast Day of the Cannibals can be purchased through the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

“Powerful and probing, Stanton’s book offers a sharp portrait of a wayward girl ‘leaping backward’ into disaster. . . A compellingly honest coming-of-age memoir.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the publisher: For Maureen Stanton’s proper Catholic mother, the town’s maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line. But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton’s once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. Stanton too slips into delinquency—vandalism, breaking and entering—all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon’s “total war” on drugs. Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.

Maureen Stanton, the author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, has been awarded the Iowa Review prize, a Pushcart Prize, the American Literary Review award in nonfiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Stanton teaches at UMass Lowell, and her work appeared most recently in NER 39.2.

Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood can be purchased online from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt or at your local independent bookstore.

“The Wound, with timely and urgent precision, leads the reader to value its activist energy and depth of insight into the ‘ambiguities’ of the human condition, in which intuitions of dwelling in peace are at war with an impulse—always a repulsive one from Kinsella’s perspective—to conquer and master.” —Michael O’Neill, The London Magazine

From the publisher: The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella. The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area’s wildlife . . . In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity.

John Kinsella is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, and has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards, including a Young Australian Creative Fellowship and a two-year Fellowship from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council. His work can be found in NER 36.1 and is forthcoming this fall in 40.3.

The Wound can be purchased from the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.

New Books from NER Authors: June 2018

June 18, 2018

From Mark Twain to George Saunders, Bradley Bazzle’s Trash Mountain joins a long tradition of dark humor, wild inventiveness, and social satire in American letters. ―Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza.

From the publisher: Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way.

Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award. His short story “Gift Horse” appeared in NER 31.4. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.

Trash Mountain can be purchased from your independent booksellers and online.

In a time when we confront daily the frenetic, desensitizing maelstrom of political rhetoric and a ubiquitous flood of mass media, Bruce Bond reminds us in Dear Reader of the quiet but urgent philosophical and spiritual inquiries, sometimes monstrous and animal, that define and affirm our humanity. —Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City and Correspondence

From the publisher: In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world—the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts.

Bruce Bond is the author of sixteen books including For the Lost Cathedral, The Other Sky, and Black Anthem, which won a Tampa Review Prize in 2016. Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas. His poem “Blood” was published in NER 36.2.

Dear Reader can be purchased directly from the publisher.

Like the birds that populate so many of his poems, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Dulce is a lesson in song, an instructive repetition of the melodies that shape the inner self. The poems here are for a reader willing to mix and remix, to reimagine themselves in a thousand pieces. —Matthew Shenoda, author of Somewhere Else

From the publisher: Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet. Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a Canto Mundo fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He cofounded the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award from Poets and Writers magazine. His poems “Pulling the Moon” and “Rituals of Healing” appeared in NER 35.2.

Dulce: Poems can be purchased from the publisher.

Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk. ―The New York Times

From the publisher: Tony Hoagland’s poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less skeptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoagland’s poetry has gotten bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces―and spaciousness―in the human predicament.

Tony Hoagland is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Application for Release from the Dream and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two of his poems appeared recently in NER 38.3.

Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God can be purchased online.

Norman Lock’s fiction, The Wreckage of Eden, shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. ―NPR

From the Publisher: Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.

Norman Lock is an author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has honored with The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His fiction has appeared frequently in NER, most recently with “A Theory of the Self” in NER 34.2.

The Ensemble can be purchased directly from the publisher, or from independent booksellers.

Well imagined, intricately plotted, and deeply felt, both humane and human. It unfurls like a peony: you keep thinking it can’t get any more perfect, and it does. A stunning feat. —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History and Koolaids: The Art of War

From the publisher: A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Harper’s, and Tin House, among others. Her story “The Briefcase” was featured in New England Review 29.2.

The Great Believers can be purchased directly from the publisher.

New Books by NER Authors

June 27, 2017

The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine—or fathom—the great world. —University of Michigan Press

From the publisher: The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both the poem and the essay work beyond a human sense of time. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. The essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of an odd detail or bothersome question that would not quit—Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous, or as quiet as a half-second of genuine discovery? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going, so what if the world is ending! Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open?

Marianne Boruch is Professor of English, Purdue University, and a faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her ninth poetry collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (Copper Canyon Press), was cited as a “Most Loved Book of 2016” by the New Yorker. Two of her poems appear in NER 38.2; prior to that NER 33.2 featured “The End Inside It,” an essay republished in The Little Death of Self.

University of Michigan Press released The Little Death of Self as part of its series, “Poets on Poetry.”

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The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home—all come crashing down . . . —W. W. Norton

From the publisher: In 2007, Todd Boss crossed the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis just twenty minutes before its disastrous collapse into the Mississippi. Thirteen people died in the accident, and 145 were injured. Tough Luck, a collection of poems, is anchored in this event and the questions it raised for him, his family, and his community. The poems’ down-to-earth quality and strong sense of place will appeal to readers of Robert Frost, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney.

Todd Boss, director of external affairs at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His book Yellowrocket won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for Poetry. Boss’ work appeared in NER 28.4.

Tough Luck is available from publisher W. W. Norton & Co. and independent booksellers.

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Dimitrov instills palpable emotional yearning in his readers, as if you’re a tourist inside your own life: “A little of our misplaced lives, / we saw them waving on the roof in the dark / and thought they were birds.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, Together and By Ourselves, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal or professional lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.

In addition to Together and By Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov is the author of Begging for It and the online chapbook American Boys. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. He has taught creative writing and literature at Bennington College, Columbia University, and Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He currently resides in New York City. His poem “Champagne” was included in NER 36.3.

Together and By Ourselves can be purchased directly from the publisher, Copper Canyon Press, as well as from independent booksellers.

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With exceptional candor, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds—the multitudinous experiences of mothering, illness, and the ever-present embodiment of race—finding fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. —W. W. Norton

From the publisher: Camille Dungy journeyed across America working as a poet-lecturer, all the while tending to her daughter, then only a toddler. In her prose debut, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, she recounts the experience, paying particular attention to the way in which she and her child were perceived as two black females. Dungy grapples with the painful legacy of the slave trade, but she also celebrates motherhood and those bright moments that characterize her daughter’s entrance into the world.

Camille Dungy is a professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. Her collections of poetry have won numerous honors, including the American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Open Book Prize. Her essay “A Shade North of Ordinary,” an excerpt from her travels, appeared in NER 36.2.

Guidebook to Relative Strangers is available from publisher W. W. Norton & Co. and independent booksellers.

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A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day. —Victor LaValle

From the publisher: In Norman Lock’s fourth book of The American Novels series, Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity, culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His work has appeared in New England Review numerous times, most recently in NER 34.2.

A Fugitive in Walden Woods can be purchased directly from its publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, or from independent booksellers.

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The first collection from the multi-award-winning American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien, including The Body of an American.

Plays One includes the following five pieces: The Body of an American, The House in Hydesville, The Cherry Sisters Revisited, The Voyage of the Carcass, and The Dear Boy.

Dan O’Brien is a playwright and poet and recent Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. In addition to his work as a playwright he has published multiple volumes of poetry, most recently in 2015 in a collection entitled New Life. An alumnus of Middlebury College, he currently resides in Los Angeles. An excerpt from his play The House in Scarsdale will appear in NER 38.3.

Plays One can be purchased directly from the publisher, Oberon Books, or from independent booksellers.

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A comprehensive yet eminently readable—even exhilarating—romp through Berlin’s history, coupled with a native’s view of its colorful present. Eveything you need to know about the German capital, and more. —Kimberly Bradley, Monocle Magazine

In Berlin, Joseph Pearson retraces the history of Germany’s capital city, from its beginnings as a small settlement to its present role as one of the world’s economic and political centers. Berlin’s nine-hundred-year history has been colored by vicious regimes, pivotal artistic movements, scandalous night life, and industrial innovation. Pearson walks the streets of modern-day Berlin to find echoes of this tumultuous past, and to turn up the city’s little-known secrets.

Joseph Pearson is a cultural historian and writer at New York University, Berlin. His essay “Three German Cities” appears in NER 37.3. You can read more about Pearson in his “Behind the Byline” interview, in which he speaks with nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree regarding the link among self, history, and politics.

Berlin is available from the University of Chicago Press (North and South America only) and from their Reaction Books (UK/Europe), as well as from independent booksellers.

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Less a practical guide than an anthology of think pieces, How We Speak to One Another will nonetheless send nonfiction writers eagerly back to their desks. And it’s a fun read, even for nonwriters. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: How We Speak to One Another is some of the most engaging evidence we’ve got that the essay is going strong. Here, essayists talk back to each other, to the work they love and the work that disquiets them, and to the very basic building blocks of what we understand “essay” to be. What’s compiled in these pages testifies to the endless flexibility, generosity, curiosity, and audacity of essays. Even more than that, it provides the kind of pleasure any great essay collection does—upsetting our ideas and challenging the way we organize our sense of the world.

Craig Reinbold, one of the editors of this collection, has seen his writing appear in many journals and magazines including the Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Brevity. He was the managing editor of Essay Daily from 2013-2016. One of his essays, “All Things Equal on the West Side,” can be found in NER 33.3.

How We Speak to One Another is available directly from Coffee House Press and from independent booksellers.

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Simic has always had a knack for channeling the morbid—and managing to blend it with the joyous. It is in navigating those kinds of opposing emotions that he is at his most clever and profound . . . Image by image, Simic composes miniature masterpieces, offering what appears as a seemingly effortless study in language’s cinematic possibilities. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: The latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer’s pen—Scribbled in the Dark brings the poet’s signature sardonic sense of humor, piercing social insight, and haunting lyricism to diverse and richly imagined landscapes.

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University. He is a longtime contributor to New England Review, most recently with his translation work in N ER 29.1.

Scribbled in the Dark is for sale directly from its publisher Ha rper Collins and from independent booksellers.

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