Editors Select

	R. D. Skillings, Where the Time Goes, University Press of New England, 1999. A frequent contributor to NDR, Skillings' new collection is a sequel to his 1980 book, P-town Stories (or the meatrack), and, like its predecessor, is full of trenchant, poignant short narratives that assemble the mosaic portrait of a place and a time. A trove of prose gems, glittering with "cults of healing and self-acceptance, multifarious 12-steppers, unregenerate hedonists of every stripe," unified by "a huge chauvinism of place, personality and independent mores."
	M.G. Stephens, Where the Sky Ends: A Memoir of Alcohol & Family, Hazelden, 1999. Stephens' new memoir, a portion of which appeared in NDR #3, tells a common Irish-American tale most uncommonly. A harrowing portrait of a family and a journey taken from Brooklyn to Florida, where the "father died brainless, competent, incontinent, isolated and alone amid palms and alligators, geckos and floral shirts." A necessary threnody for damage and drink.
	Jay Neugeboren, Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living With Mental Illness, Morrow, 1999. Novelist and short-story writer Neugeboren's more expansive follow-up to his successful 1997 memoir Imagining Robert is both a survey and critique of the metal health and insurance complex, its politics and personalities. He makes "the psychiatric disaspora" tangible and judiciously weighs both the despairs and the victories that population endures and achieves.
	Jamie Kalven, Working with Available Light: A Family's World after Violence, Norton, 1999. A memoir, inspired by violence, which powerfully recounts a contemporary marriage and family life riven by trauma, the beating and sexual assault of his wife by a stranger in a park. When the extraordinary is becoming more ordinary throughout society, Kalven shows how his family rises above the senseless and cruel in everyday life. A memoir that is a powerful personal story and important social document.
	Virgin Fiction 2, Rob Weisback Books, Morrow, 1999. A new series of very fresh fiction, indeed. The writers within must have not been published in a book or national periodical hitherto. The result is lively and thoroughly hyper-contemporary. One of the best stories of the collection is "Behind Sharp Branches," by Tom Coyne, a '99 graduate of the N.D. creative writing program.
	A. Manette Ansay, Midnight Champagne, Morrow, 1999. Ansay's new novel, after River Angel and Sisters, surveys the territories of passion and marriage -- and even passionate marriage -- with her usual acute prose and sharp, riveting and skeptical eye trained on the midwest and its citizens. Like the title's namesake, the novel is a lively concoction with a pleasant, lingering aftertaste.
	Christopher Merrill, Only the Nails Remain. Rowan and Littlefield, 1999.Merrill's book about the breakup of Yugoslavia expands on the historical, political and poetic vision of his brief but beautiful 1995 volume, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee. Merrill is a poet and translator who knows the region all too well. NDR # 6 published a chapter from the new book in 1998.
	John Phillip Santos, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. Viking, 1999. Santos, a writer and producer of television documentaries for CBS and PBS, was a Notre Dame undergraduate and the first Mexican-American Rhodes scholar. Cornel West calls this memoir of his family "a poetic exploration of the ways in which remembering and forgetting inform our fragile modes of surviving and thriving. From Texas to Oxford, from grandparents to Borges, Santos takes us on a poignant pilgrimage that ends deep within our souls." NDR will review this book at length in a future issue.
	John Peck, Collected Shorter Poems 1966-1996. Carcanet Press (distributed by Dufour), 1999. NDR readers will know John Peck's work well from poems that have appeared regularly beginning with the excerpts from his long poem, M, in the inaugural issue. Peck is one of the best poets in America. The 400 pages of this collection will be read and re-read by anyone who cares to examine a poetry of uncanny insight and great technical accomplishment remote from the trivial fashions of the day.
	Sandra Alcosser, Except by Nature. Graywolf Press, 1999. Alcosser's second book of poems is winner of both the National Poetry Series competition and the 1998 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. Eamon Grennan, who selected the volume for the National Poetry Series, says of it: "I love the buoyant verbal manners of these poems, which bring politeness and ecstasy into curious alignments and which--without betrayal--transform the plain facts of life into fixtures of radiance." The book has a local Midwestern resonance as Alcosser writes in one cycle, "Sweat," about growing up "on an acre between Dixie Highway and the Illinois Central tracks" in South Bend.
	Michael Coffey, 87 North. Coffee House Press, 1999. This is a rather surprising second volume of poems after the language-centered Elemenopy published in 1996. Coffey says of his book: "I try to convey both the sense of living in a metropolis teeming with the impersonal and that of being in an expanded terrain inwhich everything makes sense, if only because one knows it so well, and everyone knows everybody." The book deals both with the Route 87 of the title, running from the bottom to the top of New York State, and with Coffee's youth in the Adirondacks where he grew up in a town of only seven hundred people. Coffee is a Notre Dame graduate and managing editor of Publishers Weekly.