New England Review

New Books by NER Authors

“Superb, powerful, eloquent. Juxtaposing rich, poetic prose with direct storytelling, and alternating narratives with photos, documents, poems, maps, and music, LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE explores what holds a family and society together, and what pulls them apart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the publisher: From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family’s summer road trip across America–a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today. Told through the voices of a mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images–including prior stories of migration and displacement–Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, and NER 35.1. She lives in New York City.

Lost Children Archive can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.

“Anders Carlson-Wee makes the rugged physical and emotional world of the upper plains our world” —B. H. Fairchild

From the publisher: Explosive and incantatory, The Low Passions traces the fringes of the American experiment through the eyes of a young drifter. Pathologically frugal, reckless, and vulnerable, the narrator of these viscerally compelling poems hops freight trains, hitchhikes, dumpster dives, and sleeps in the homes of total strangers, scavenging forgotten and hardscrabble places for tangible forms of faith. Amplified by a chorus of monologues from the strangers who shelter him, and the family he’s left behind, a range of strong-willed characters takes shape—made manifest by the poet’s devoted ear and sensitive eye.

Anders Carlson-Wee’s poems have appeared in the Nation, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, BuzzFeed, and many other publications. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize, he lives in Minneapolis. His work appears in NER 36.1 and 39.3.

The Low Passions can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

“This arresting debut short story collection often finds its protagonists poised between disaster and redemption…Nuanced and empathetic, at times dangerous, tragic, or redemptive, these stories find their subjects in the midst of pivotal moments in their lives, as they struggle with impulses and actions both animalistically urgent and deeply, hauntingly human.” —Kirkus (starred review)

From the publisher: In these lucid, sharply observant stories, Mandeliene Smith traces the lives of men and women in moments of crisis: a woman whose husband has just died, a social worker struggling to escape his own past, a girl caught in a standoff between her mother’s boyfriend and the police. A lively and insightful collection, Rutting Season is dark, humorous, and moving, filled with complex characters who immediately demand our interest and attention.

Mandeliene Smith is a writer from Lexington, MA. Her stories have appeared in Guernica, The Sun, New England Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story “Mercy” was selected by Stephen King for the list of “100 Other Distinguished Stories” in The Best American Short Stories 2007. To support her writing habit over the years, Mandeliene has waited tables, weeded gardens, taught writing, worked as a secretary, and translated books into Braille, among other things. Smith published the story “Friday Night” in NER 25.4 (2004).

Rutting Season can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.

“…[Josip Novakovich’s] prose is so balanced and apt, with not a superfluous clause or descriptor, that it always lands artfully. This is a haunting, accomplished collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the publisher: Both absurd and melancholy, Honey in the Carcase, the newest collection from award-winning Josip Novakovich, moves from scenes as familiar as a dinner party to the brutal landscapes of war-torn Southeast Europe. A man tends bees amid the bombed-out husks of his village. A young girl takes revenge for the loss of a precious life. A Yugoslav drifter finds himself at dead ends in the American heartland. A marriage splinters over a suspicious scent. A cat and a dog enact ancient enmity in the midst of a war zone. An old debt is repaid. And a boy and a juvenile hawk seem to be on a similar quest for freedom and adventure, though violence lurks in the wilds just beyond the window.

Josip Novakovich is a Croatian-American writer who resides in Canada. His work has been translated into Croatian, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Italian, and French, among other languages. He was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 and also received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Fiction, as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Threepenny, Ploughshares, and NER 13.3-4 (1991), and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches English at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

Honey in the Carcase can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“Aurelie Sheehan writes eerie legends, intimate stories, and beguiling personal confessions that chase after the bottomless mystery inside our everyday lives. These are fictions stamped with truth, or they are true accounts suffused with the clear magic of fiction, crafted by a writer who is a gifted and lyrical seer, shrewdly attuned to what is most worth calling out from our complicated and contested reality.” —Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog

From the publisher: Aurelie Sheehan’s Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories, a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. What is the difference between fiction and a lie? These stories dwell in a netherworld between memory and the imagination, and explore ways of telling the truth without a reliance on facts.

Aurelie Sheehan is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories and the novel History Lesson for Girls. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and NER 26.3 (2005).

Once into the Night can be purchased from FC2 or at an independent bookseller near you.

“Biespiel’s finest book of poems to date. Republic Café builds on his strengths as a lyric poet with a social conscience, a latter-day Romantic in a skeptical time. Republic Café is both personal and political, much in the manner of its evident forbear, Walt Whitman. This is a postmodernist’s Romanticism.” —David Baker, author of Swift: New and Selected Poems

From the publisher: Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time, Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment.

David Biespiel is a poet, critic, memoirist, and author of Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women, and Charming Gardeners. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the New York Times, Politico, Slate, and NER 39.4 (2018).

Republic Café can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

NER Author Awards

Congratulations to all of our NER authors who have been recognized with awards so far this year, including Reginald Dwayne Betts, Thi Bui, Victoria Chang, Camille Dungy, Brad Felver, Rickey Laurentiis, James Longenbach, Valeria Luiselli, Molly Spencer, Brian Tierney, and Monica Youn. We are so proud of you and we continue to look forward to hearing about your next literary endeavors!

Brad Felver is the winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which is one of the most prestigious awards for a book-length collection of short stories or novellas. His manuscript, “The Dogs of Detroit,” is a collection of short stories, each of which focuses on grief and its many permutations, and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this year. Felver’s essay “City of Glass” can be found in NER 39.1

Three NER authors received awards from the Poetry Society of America. The Society gives awards for single poems, collections, and manuscripts, and each award has its own criteria.

Victoria Chang was awarded the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for her poetry collection, titled Obit. The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award is awarded to outstanding manuscripts-in-progress of poetry. A selection of poems from the collection can be found on the Foundation’s website here. Poems from Chang’s Obit also appeared in NER 38.3.

The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award has been given to Molly Spencer for her poem “Interior with a Woman Peeling Oranges, Snapping Beans.“ The award was created by Maury Medwick in honor of his wife Lucille, and is awarded for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme. Two of Spencer’s poems were published in NER 38.4.

Brian Tierney has been awarded the George Bogin Memorial Award. The Award was established by the family and friends of George Bogin for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. Tierney’s poem “All Stars Are Lights, Not All Lights Are Stars” is online on the Foundation’s website, and his poetry appears in NER 38.1.

Four NER Authors were named as finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The NBCC Award is awarded each March in six categories: fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, and criticism.

Thi Bui was a finalist in the autobiography category for her graphic novel The Best We Could Do, which explores her Vietnamese heritage and shares the stories of her parents’ lives. Bui’s illustrated memoir piece, “Blood and Rice,” appeared in NER 37.4.

Camille Dungy‘s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, made the finals list in the criticism category. Guidebook to Relative Strangers details Dungy’s experiences of traveling cross country with her young daughter, and interplay between others’ perceptions of them as mother-and-child and as black women. Dungy’s work can be found in NER 36.2.

Valeria Luiselli was also named a finalist in the criticism category. Her work Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions provides stark contrast between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children living in the US. Luiselli’s work “Stuttering Cities” (translated by Christina MacSweeney) appeared in the 35.1 issue of NER.

James Longenbach was named a finalist for poetry. His collection of poems, titled Earthling, blends the meditations of a modern-day “earthling” with many different perspectives, exploring what it means to be an inhabitant of Earth and how we confront our own mortality. Longenbach’s writing has been published multiple times by NER, most recently in 32.1.

Rickey Laurentiis has been awarded the prestigious Whiting Award for poetry. The Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, is based on early accomplishment and the promise of outstanding writing to come. Laurentiis’s debut book is titled Boy with Thorn: Poems, and his poem “Memory and Happiness” appeared in NER 36.2.

Two NER authors were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their poetry. Each year, roughly 175 Fellowships are awarded to individuals who demonstrate exceptional capabilities in productive scholarship, or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Monica Youn is the author of three books: Blackacre, Ignatz, and Barter. Her work has also been published in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Lana Turner, the Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her work appeared most recently in NER 37.1.

Reginald Dwayne Betts has published three collections of poetry: Near Burn and Burden: a collection of poems, Sahid Reads His Own Hand, and Bastards of the Reagan Era. His work can be found in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

And lastly, James Magruder‘s new musical Head Over Heels will be premiering on Broadway this month. The musical is an adaption of Sir Philip Sidney’s well known play Arcadia and features a mash-up of the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. His story story “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” appeared in NER 32.3.

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