New England Review

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
    • Vol. 43, No. 3 (2022)
    • Vol. 43, No. 2 (2022)
    • Vol. 43, No. 1 (2022)
    • Vol. 42, No. 4 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 3 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 2 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 1 (2021)
    • Vol. 41 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 3 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 2 (2020)
      • Black Lives Matter
      • Vol. 41, No.1 (2020)
    • Vol. 40 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 4 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 3 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 2 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No 1 (2019)
    • Vol. 39 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 4 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 3 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 1 (2018)
    • Vol. 38 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017)
      • Vol.38, No. 2 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017)
    • Vol. 37 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 3 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016)
    • Vol. 36 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 4 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 3 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 2 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 1 (2015)
    • Vol. 35 (2014-2015)
      • Vol. 35, No.1 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015)
    • Vol. 34 (2013-2014)
      • Vol. 34, No. 1 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)
    • Vol. 33 (2012-2013)
      • Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 4 (2013)
    • Vol. 32 (2011-2012)
      • Vol. 32, No. 1 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012)
    • Vol. 31 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 2 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010-2011)
    • Vol. 30 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009-2010)
    • Vol. 29 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008)
    • Vol. 28 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 1 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 4 (2007)
    • Vol. 27 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 4 (2006)
    • Vol. 26 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 2 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 4 (2005)
    • Vol. 25 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 3 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 4 (2004)
    • Vol. 24 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 2 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 4 (2004)
  • About
    • Masthead
    • NER Award Winners
    • Press
    • Award for Emerging Writers
    • Readers and Interns
    • Books by our authors
    • Contact
  • Audio
  • Events
  • Submit

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.”

℘

book coverThe 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.

℘

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.

℘

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.

℘

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.

℘

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.

℘

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.

℘

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.

℘

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 NER 29.1.

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

 

 

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: A Fugitive in Walden Woods, Alex Dimitrov, Berlin, Camille Dungy, Craig Reinbold, Dan O'Brien, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, How We Speak to One Another, Marianne Boruch, Norman Lock, Scribbled in the Dark, The Little Death of Self, Todd Boss, Together and By Ourselves, Tough Luck

New Books for May from NER Authors

May 5, 2014

413IG2ug3HL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Hypnotic as it is profound

We are pleased to announce that NER contributor Norman Lock‘s new novel, The Boy in His Winter, is out from Bellevue Literary Press. His most recent story for NER, “A Theory of the Self,” appears in 34.2.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author, Gilbert King: In this surreal and otherworldly river journey through time, Norman Lock transports Huck Finn down the Mississippi and deep into America’s history—and future. Elegant and imaginative, The Boy in His Winter is a tale that’s as hypnotic as it is profound.”

Norman Lock is a recipient of a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, saw his play The House of Correction revived in Istanbul, and published a new collection of stories, Love Among the Particles, featuring three pieces of fiction originally published in New England Review.

 

9781556594663_p0_v1_s260x420Mythical sea beasts, loads of laundry, and high school athletics 

Congratulations to NER contributor Laura Kasischke on the publication of her newest collection of poems, The Infinitesimals (Copper Canyon Press). Laura Kasischke’s poetry first appeared in NER 16.1 in 1994, and most recently in NER 32.4.

Publisher’s Weekly describes Kasischke’s latest work: “Mythical sea beasts, loads of laundry, and high school athletics all populate Kasischke’s rich imagination.”

Laura Kasischke is currently the Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon) and has recently been honored by the Michigan Library Association with the 2013 Michigan Author Award.

 

9780544074811_p0_v2_s260x420A story of second chances

We are pleased to announce Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s publication of Wonderland, the newest novel from NER contributor Stacey D’Erasmo. Her essay “Influence: A Practice in Three Wanders” appears in issue 31.4.

Publisher’s Weekly calls this “A story of second chances . . . meticulously crafted. . . .”

Stacey D’Erasmo is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fiction. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine,  New York Times Book Review, Boston Review, Bookforum, and Ploughshares, among other publications.

 

As much prayer as it is poetrySamaras

NER is pleased to congratulate Nicholas Samaras on the recent publication of his newest collection of poetry American Psalm, World Psalm (Ashland Poetry Press). His poetry has been published in NER several times since 1994, and his most recent contributions (“Approach” / “At Night”) appear in 28.3.

From The Daily Beat News Blog: “Samaras … has reinvented modern poetry with this groundbreaking book … The poet combines a sense of morality that is virtually unmatched with a concrete abstraction reminiscent of the likes of a Pablo Neruda.”

Nicholas Samaras’s first book, Hands of the Saddlemaker, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1992. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, New Republic, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. In 1997, he was a recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts Poetry Fellowship.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, NER Community Tagged With: American Psalm World Psalm, Laura Kasischke, Nicholas Samaras, Norman Lock, Stacey D'Erasmo, The Boy in His Winter, The Infinitesimals, Wonderland

Grim Tales

May 15, 2013

Norman Lock’s short story “Grim Tales” appeared in NER 23.4 (2002):

The trees now grew without observing any longer the limits assigned them by nature. They reached into the sky until they looked out over “the floor of heaven.” Recalling the old story, boys climbed them. Not only boys but men and even some old men who wished for gold. One by one they fell–the old men and the young, and the boys, too–not one of them having reached the top branches let alone the floor of heaven. Instead, they fell, all of them, earning for themselves neither wealth nor fame, only death at the foot of the unruly trees. And still the trees continued to grow without regard for the limitations of their kind until the roots tore from the ground and the earth was broken into pieces and destroyed.

[read more]

Filed Under: NER Classics Tagged With: Grim Tales, Norman Lock

New Books from NER Writers: Love Among the Particles

May 13, 2013

lock2NER contributor Norman Lock has released his new collection of short-stories, Love Among the Particles. From the publisher:

“Love Among the Particles is virtuosic story telling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and literary history, Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages. His characters may walk out of the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, or Gaston Leroux, but they are distinctly his own. Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist, unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite suddenly dematerializes and passes through the Internet, in search of true love . . . Love Among the Particles will thrill Norman Lock’s devoted fans and dazzle new readers with its dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics. It is nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous.”

Norman Lock has published novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage, radio, and screen plays. His honors include The Paris Review Aga Kahn Prize for Fiction and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Love Among the Particles includes three stories first published in New England Review: “Tango in Amsterdam” (24.4), “The Captain is Sleeping” (26.4), and “The Monster in Winter” (28.3). Lock’s new story, “A Theory of the Self,” will appear in NER 34.2 this summer.

Love Among the Particles is available at Powell’s and other booksellers.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, NER Community Tagged With: Love Among the Particles, Norman Lock

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »


Vol. 43, No. 4

Subscribe

NER Digital

Tomas Venclova

Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

Sign up for our newsletter

Click here to join our list and receive occasional news and always-great writing.

categories

Navigation

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Support NER
  • About
  • Advertising
  • Audio
  • Back Issues
  • Emerging Writers Award
  • Events
  • Podcast

ner via email

Stories, poems, essays, and web features delivered to your Inbox.

Categories

Copyright © 2023 · facebook · twitter

 

Loading Comments...