EDITORS SELECT

Click here to buy book from Borders.	Corinne Demas, Eleven Stories High: Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948- 1968, SUNY Press, 2000. NDR contributor Demas' childhood memoir is a remarkable portrait of a vanished world, but not a vanished place. The social history it captures is important, presenting the story of a transitional generation of women, suspended between the quietism of the American Dream of the post-war era of the 1950s and the tumultuous upheavals to come at the end of the 1960s. A vivid and paradoxical picture of both urban America and domestic life once lived, captured by a writer of lyric strengths and fastidious intellect.
	Craig Nova, Brook Trout and the Writing Life , The Lyons Press, 1999. Acclaimed novelist Nova's first book of nonfiction, a brief, but lapidary look at life from a trout fisher's oblique eye view. Though reminiscent of Hemingway (if "Papa" had been a dedicated family man), Nova limns a life suspended both from and in time. A new age The Compleat Angler, the reading of which Edward Dahlberg (who Nova admiringly quotes—unacknowledged ) once long ago remarked, would make anyone "more quiet."
	Peter Ho Davis, Equal Love, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000. Ho's second collection (after The Ugliest House in the World , 1997) and equally remarkable. Ho is a transnational, a citizen of the world, and his stories' range is far- reaching. San Francisco's Chinatown, rustic Britain, and rural New Hampshire, Ho takes up residence in any or all of these milieus and calls it home. Ho is one of the best of the younger generation of short story writers.
	Michael Martone, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, The Unisversity of Georgia Press, 2000 NDR contributor Martone's new collection of essays won the 1998 Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the best illuminators of the Midwestern triptych, its people, places and propensities, and throughout these various entertaining and insightful essays, his thoroughly geodesic eye surveys the horizontal imperatives of the most interior of our nation's states.
	Jaimy Gordon, Bogeywoman, Sun & Moon Classics, 1999. Readers of Gordon's Shamp of the City-Solo (1980) and She Drove Without Stopping (1990) will not be disappointed with Bogeywoman. In a breathtaking tour de force Gordon's narrator, the Bogeywoman of the title, takes the dazzled reader along for 350 pages of riffs and rants as a Charlie Parker solo. In the psychiatric ward of a hospital, she becomes a member of a musical group called the Bug Motels and meets the amazing Madame Zuk -- a psychiatrist, and much more than that as well. A book for readers who still love language and who like their language charged. The best nuthouse novel since One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
	Joshua Barkan, Before Hiroshima and Other Stories, tobypress.com, 2000. Joshua Barkan's first volume of stories is one of the first titles to be published by The Toby Press, titles available only through their web site. The first story—a novella, really—is told by a Japanese intelligence officer who has discovered the importance of "The Pumpkin Project"—dummy bombs dropped at various locations around Japan to see if planes could carry heavy payloads like the "Fat Man" finally dropped on Hiroshima. The book is an impressive debut and the title story has been praised by Saul Bellow, among others. The other Toby Press titles are worth looking into as well. This program may represent one future, if not necessarily the future, of literary publishing.
Click here to buy book from Borders	Basil Bunting, Complete Poem s, Bloodaxe, 2000. Bunting's many readers in this country will be delighted to discover that his work is back in print and available through the American distributor of Bloodaxe Books, Dufour Editions. Bunting's small but marvelous body of work is increasingly seen as among the major contributions to modernist writing. All of the familiar "Sonatas" are included— "Briggflatts," "The Spoils," "Villon"—along with the odes, the translations, and a range of previously uncollected poems and versions (or "overdrafts," as he called them) from various poetries that engaged Bunting during his long life. The volume comes with a double cassette tape on which Bunting reads most of his major poems. He was one of the great performers of poetry. Hearing him read his own work is an enormous pleasure.
	Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, editors, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, Vintage, 2000. Harper and Walton have edited what may well become a definitve anthology. Beginning with poets like Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, Frances E.W. Harper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the book represents familiar figures from the Harlem Renaissance and major writers such as Jean Toomer, Sterling A. Brown, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Robert Hayden. The final third of the book turns to contemporary poets without lowering poetic standards (there's no hip hop; there's no rap). Selections from Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Jay Wright, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Michael Harper himself are substantial and original. The book includes only 50 poets from the colonial period to the present. It dares to exercise that rare thing these days—true editorial judgment.
Click here to buy book from Borders	William Borden, Eurydice's Song, St. Andrews College Press, 1999. Monotypes by Douglas Kinsey. Borden and Kinsey have produced a beautiful book on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice. Readers of Notre Dame Review will be familiar with Kinsey's work. The rich full-page and double-page illustrations capture the eye as Borden's reinvention of the familiar myth captures the ear and mind. The originality of the poem is that it is told entirely from Eurydice's point of view. As Bordon says in a note, "I wondered if Orpheus, the rock star of ancient Greece, would have been all that attentive a husband, and if Eurydice might have been seduced into the underworld. Love, even true, passionate, knocked-out love, embraces ambivalence, uncertainty, and the improbability of having everything we desire."
	Michael J. Rosen, editor, Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor, HarperCollins, 2000. An idea whose time has come, once again. Even the title is funny, as is the cover copy— "140 shots from the loose canon of American humor." The usual celebrity posse is here, along with some lesser- known humorists. Not quite the Algonquin Round Table, but a new millennium crew who create American humor of the sort that will not be found on the Fox Network.