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Hard Bottom tells that old American story of the
solitary struggler, but this version is new, and it is dazzling. Michelsen climbs right into the skin of Ollie Cahoon, failing commercial fisherman, and makes his pain a pain that matters, not just to him, but to anybody who cares about struggling to maintain a soul in a corporate age. The story's told in a language that is precise, tough and -- when it comes to the sea -- magical. A portion of Hard Bottom appeared in NDR 7. |
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Two novels by two graduates of Notre Dame's
graduate creative writing program. Collins' novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when it first appeared in its British edition. Jonathan Raban called it "an expert and witty homage to the noir American Thriller and a wonderfully observant and affecting portrait of America in its once -- and future -- decline" and "an unflaggingly brilliant stylistic performance. I can think of no other writer who rises to such heights of lavish eloquence even as he remains so very cool and ironically self-aware." Coyne's novel, his first, is a fine coming-into-manhood story and a damn good golf novel. It's also a long clean swing at the old myths about family and class and making it. A film version will appear in 2002. |
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Schmidt's second delicious collection of short stories,
the first being The Rose Thieves. Witty, insightful, full of likely characters behaving in unlikely ways. In the story "Wild Rice," a writer accedes to an invitation to teach at a summer conference. Schmidt writes, "I hate to dash any pleasure, even a spider's, even when I'm the fly." Luckily, we can all be ensnared in her wonderful web. |
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A first collection of gracefully stolid stories, full of
hard choices and hard lives. A new generation confronts life at the end of the 20th century, dealing with the disintegration of old traditions, but not free of old conditions, love, divorce, aging, alcoholism, and jobs made temporary by design and circumstances. An impressive debut. |
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A first novel, by a writer of an award winning collection
of short stories (Useful Gifts) praised by Richard Elman as "rowdy and poignant with feelings and smarting hilarity," returns to life and memories of New York City in the 1950s, in and around a boisterous Brooklyn, detailing the marital history of the Arnows, Chenia and Ruben, told by their daughter Devorah. The Ocean the characters swim toward is mortality and the novel is a gift to the mother by the daughter, one affecting for both its language and its pluming of family relationships and their lasting costs and rewards. |
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Another first novel, this one set in Japan, where American
teachers confront cultural barriers and the urge to breach them. Under daily dusting of ash from the increasingly active volcano Sakurajima, the displaced New Englander befriends a group of windsurfers, parries with her new boyfriend, Hiroshi, and, in a fateful meeting, encounters a half Japanese teenager, Naomi, who is also battling a double identity. Thompson writes movingly about a Japan that is not sleek and urban, nor the older stereotyped domain of geisha and samurai, and about characters who straddle that new world. |
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A new kind of literary anthology, a number of writers brought
together in the form of letters to their fathers, expressing a generational plea of son and daughter to the old man, a mixture of autobiography, psychological insight and practise, love and the balm or fire of memory, all brought to bear on the essential question of who they are and why that might be. |
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NDR frequent contributor Skillings' first novel (not counting
the novella Obsidian) is set in Provincetown during the AIDS ravaged 1980s. This is an erudite and searing threnody for a time and place, full of characters bursting with life and the heart-rending exfoliations of their deaths. One of the best first novels of the year. |
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Anyone interested in the art of poetry at Notre Dame already
knows Ernest Sandeen's work. An earlier collected poems appeared in 1977 and was followed by A Later Day, Another Year in 1988 and Can These Bones Live ? in 1994. The present volume adds the poems from these last two books to the contents of the 1977 collection. This means that all the poetry Ernest Sandeen wished to keep in print is finally available in a single book. The volume is beautifully produced and includes a helpful introduction by Edward Vasta and a preface by Robert Pinsky. Sandeen's work was always central to everything happening in the Notre Dame literary community, but only occasionally, in spite of regular publications in journals like The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Hudson Review, did his reputation seem to extend beyond the university. This book should make clear that Sandeen, despite and maybe because of his modesty and isolation, was one of the best poets of his generation. Robert Hass got it exactly right when he said that Sandeen's work "has a sort of sweet gravity to it that makes you feel that the poet was a genuinely wise man. You feel that in his craft as much as in anything else, that the poem says what it needs to say, so that not needing to show off is a form of beauty. There is a kind of seriousness and grace." |
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Janet Holmes's The Green Tuxedo won the 1999 Ernest
Sandeen Prize in Poetry. Humanophone is possibly even better than that remarkable book. The main attraction is a series of poems about composers and music. These poems develop a musician's analog to the venerable Ut pictura Poesis tradition, or the notion of Ecphrasis. In poems like "Celebration on the Planet Mars" (about Raymond Scott), "Humanophone" (about George and Charles Ives) and the concluding "Parch Stations" (abut Harry Partch), she has done something really original. These composers all had to invent new instruments before they could play the music they heard in their minds. The analogy with the poem in the mind--and the new form it must take--is clear. "How easy to be orthodox: harder, / to hear, with his absolute pitch, / sounds new rather than wrong" she writes of George Ives. W.S. Merwin says that "music in these pieces becomes a metaphor, a true metaphor that cannot be paraphrased but sends out its illuminating beams over the singularity of our lives." |
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Readers of Ferry's Odes of Horace (1997) and The
Eclogues of Virgil (1999) will certainly want to read his versions of The Epistles. Written mostly in iambics rather than an approximation in English of Horace's Latin hexameters, Ferry's translations attempt to capture the voice that he says is "the life of these poems: so free, so confident, so knowledgeable about himself, and about work, so contemptuous of pretense, so entertaining, so joyful. The voice is an invention, of course, or a playing field of inventions, but it gives the illusion of speaking to us as we hear it with a startlingly familiar immediacy." |
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Carson's "Tangos" are in fact a cycle of poems
that picks up about where her previous book, Men in the Off Hours, concludes. In some ways it is also a long dialogue with Keats. Well-known as classical scholar as well as a poet, Carson is about as smart writing about eros as anyone around. Her books certainly should be read in the context of her brilliant Eros the Bittersweet, reprinted by Dalkey Archive in 1998 and still available. |
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This is Simic's wry and touching memoir about growing up
in war-torn Belgrade, post-war Paris, New York and Chicago. As a kid on the street in all these cities, he developed a passionate appetite for literature and became, rather to his surprise, the poet Charles Simic. The poet has been writing a lot of prose recently, and it is all worth reading. This is a fascinating book. |