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Books

Below are our favorite books—the most valuable and enduring. They will help you refine your craft, market your work, and enjoy the writing life. Click the links for reviews, excerpts and ordering information.

Individual Poems, Poets, & Writers

Derrick Brown
Champion slam poet crafts similes like none other. Juxtaposed concepts are startling yet so right. ("I feel like a cloud she says/ and i know this is true/ for i know the terrible things that go on inside of clouds.") Even if you have too many books, buy his.

Poetry and Humor

This Gardener's Impossible Dream
By Emery L. Campbell. Light verse from the Georgia Poetry Society's former vice president, featuring both original works and translations of French poems by La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.

Poetry of War

Being Frank with Anne
By Phyllis Johnson. This poetry book for young adults fleshes out the emotions and events narrated in the classic Holocaust memoir 'The Diary of Anne Frank'. Read sample poems on her website.

Floating Girl (Angel of War)
By Robert Randolph. Luminous poems depict the spiritual tragedy of warfare through the idealized figure of the dead child, who amazingly deigns to comfort us with her beauty even as she indicts the ways we fall short of true humanity. The title poem in this prizewinning collection from Elixir Press took first prize in the 2003 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest. The book cover and design are also first-rate.

For Love of a Soldier
Edited by Jane Collins. Heartfelt collection of interviews with military families who have become activists against the Iraq war. These brave parents, spouses and relatives of Iraq war veterans must contend with their loved ones' PTSD, injuries or death, while also facing accusations of being "unpatriotic" for speaking out against what they see as a senseless waste of life. Among those interviewed are the founders of Military Families Speak Out.

Here, Bullet
By Brian Turner. Recently returned from the Iraq war, this former infantry team leader depicts the agony and adrenalin rush of combat, as well as the moments of unexpected stillness and beauty in a soldier's precarious life in a foreign land. This striking debut collection won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Read an interview with him at the NY Foundation for the Arts website.

The Moon Reflected Fire
By Doug Anderson. Vietnam veteran's searing, lyrical, dark-humored poems relate the surreal horrors and feverish pleasures of that war to a wider tradition of Western moral and literary struggles with our capacity for destruction. Anderson weaves a tapestry of connections between the Trojan War, Vietnam, and the drug-fueled violence of our streets. Winner of the 1994 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Don't miss his most recent collection, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police.

Essential Tools

2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market from Writer's Digest
Annual directory for fiction writers provides extensive listings of book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests and more. This year, you'll find an "increased focus on editorial to help give context to the listing content. From amazing craft articles (crafting emotion in fiction) to helpful business advice (marketing a small press book), the 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers everything a fiction writer looking to get published could want."

2013 Poet's Market from Writer's Digest
Published annually, this is a leading directory of journals, magazines, book publishers, chapbook publishers, websites, grants, conferences, workshops and contests. Helps you find publishers who are looking for your kind of work. This year, "the editorial content in the front of the book has been revamped to include more articles on the Business of Poetry, Promotion of Poetry, and Craft of Poetry. Learn how to navigate the social media landscape, write various poetic forms, give a perfect reading, and more."

2013 Writer's Market from Writer's Digest
This annual directory for prose writers offers comprehensive listings of book publishers, magazines, trade publications and literary agents. "You'll find advice on pitching agents and editors, finding money for your writing in unexpected places, and promoting your writing. Plus, you'll learn how to navigate the social media landscape, negotiate contracts, and protect your work. And as usual, this edition includes the ever popular 'How Much Should I Charge?' pay rate chart."

Art and Fear
By David Bayles and Ted Orland. A small book full of wisdom about overcoming the psychological barriers that can prevent us from taking our own work seriously.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Anne Lamott's witty look at the secret pleasures of writing, with wise advice for a writer's hardest tasks.

Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte
Tufte's magnificent, lavishly-printed works show the power and subtlety of wise use of design, color, typography, layouts, pictures and illustrations. Don't just make a book, make a treasure.

How to Make a Living as a Poet
By Gary Mex Glazner. Successful slam poet offers creative ways to support a career as a full-time writer. Also includes advice about how to give good readings, write effective press releases, and other practical skills.

Poetry Previews
Reviews important contemporary poets and makes it easy to order their books.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction
By Brian Kiteley. Over 200 inventive exercises to help you break out of old patterns and discover new things about your characters. Kiteley uses word limits rather than time limits to provide discipline and focus. The prompts are grouped according to the technique they are designed to develop (timing, narrative voice, and so forth) and include brief discussions of why they work.

The Chicago Manual of Style: 15th Edition
Released in August 2003, this classic reference for authors and editors has undergone its most extensive revision in twenty years. Create work that meets today's professional standards with guidance on grammar, usage, formats, design and sourcing (including electronic and online sources).

Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer
Gentle advice from Bruce Holland Rogers helps you make your moods work for you, judge if and when to quit your day job, get along with the others in your home and tap the power of positive and negative thinking. Click here for 10 quick tips:

Write Ways to Win Writing Contests
Author John Reid, a widely published Australian novelist and award-winning poet (under the name Tom Howard), has written a witty and practical guide to finding the best contests for your work. Topics include identifying the judges' tastes, "popular" versus "literary" styles of writing, preparing a professional-looking manuscript and avoiding scam contests. Though his examples are drawn from fiction, poets will also find this guide indispensable.

Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to Contract
By Blythe Camenson and Marshall J. Cook. Everything you need to know about pitching your novel to agents and editors. Includes advice on selecting an agent, plus how to write query letters, synopses and book proposals, with many helpful samples of each.

Recommended Poetry Books

A Bride of Narrow Escape
By Paulann Petersen. Lush poems, at first heavy with the weight of memory and responsibility as the author nurses her dying parents, then laden with a sweeter burden of nature's ripeness and the enjoyment of her own body. A mature and trustworthy voice. This book was published by Cloudbank Books in their Northwest Poetry Series.

A Defense of Poetry
By Gabriel Gudding. This winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize rediscovers the glorious art of invective in the title poem, comprising several pages of (footnoted) insults such as "your brain is the Peanut of Abomination" and "suing you would be like suing a squirrel". This book is a uniquely uninhibited burst of creativity which reminds poets how much firepower we're not using.

And Still the Music
By Alison Townsend. In this prizewinning poetry chapbook from Flume Press, the author speaks on behalf of "Eve and Persephone and all/ those other wayward girls" who bravely danced through a dangerous world. Even painful anecdotes brim with a life force conveyed by Townsend's love of sensory details. Book design is above-average with glossy paper and French flaps.

Any Holy City
By Mark Conway. Winner of the Gerald Cable Award reclaims the story of Abraham and Isaac as token of the fierce, ambivalent love of fathers for sons, and perhaps of God for man - a love that in one moment could devour its creation or die for it. Other poems take us from the American prairie to the permeable border between the worlds of the living and the dead. "This is how we came to/ love this life - / by wanting/ the next."

Aqua Curves
By Karen Braucher. Feminine archetypes get a modern reinterpretation in verses alternately playful and poignant, in this prizewinning collection whose guiding spirit is the mermaid. Winner of the 2005 Stevens Prize from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

As If Gravity Were a Theory
By Don Colburn. Winner of the 2005 Cider Press Review Book Award, this first collection limns the wonders and losses of everyday life with clarity, compassion and a deceptive simplicity that is the distilled product of wisdom. Admirers of Douglas Goetsch and Wislawa Szymborska may find Colburn's poetic voice especially resonates with them.

AWE
By Dorothea Lasky. Marrying surrealism to a childlike matter-of-factness, in a voice reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, these poems convey the delight and bafflement of having "your mind...whipped by the large whisk of God."

Bad Bad
By Chelsey Minnis. In this unique offering from Fence Books, the author indulges her passion for the textures of language (and clothing), while poking fun at the pretensions of the academic poetry scene. Adopting the persona of a naughty little girl, the speaker of this book deflects criticism by flaunting her frivolity, yet at the same time secretly hopes to impress everyone with her cleverness. The pleasures of this book (particularly its 68 "prefaces") compensate for some repetitive passages.

Barely Breathing
By The Poet Spiel. Also known as the artist Tom Taylor, Spiel has written several books that provide material for this powerful collection of new and selected poems. With tough-guy bluntness, a wicked sense of humor, and a haiku-like economy of words, Spiel sketches characters so real you can smell their sweat: traumatized vets, greedy Americans, aging couples hanging on to love despite memory loss, one-night stands picked up in roughneck bars. This is queer poetry without aesthetic preciousness or airbrushed bodies.

Becoming the Villainess
By Jeannine Hall Gailey. Coherent, engaging first collection reads like a single long poem in the voices of fairy-tale ingenues and villainesses, B-movie femmes fatales, superheroines, and mythological women. Moving easily between colloquial humor and poignant lyricism, Gailey summons up a feminist pantheon. The recurring figure of Philomel, whom the gods turned into a nightingale after her brother-in-law raped her and cut her tongue out, epitomizes the mixed blessing of art that is brought into being by tragedy. Were women not silenced, this collection seems to say, we would not have the dazzling indirections of myth and fairy tale, the coded language of comic-book symbolism. "Everybody loves the dead girl after she's dead."

Christening the Dancer
By John Amen. Vital, innovative first collection of poems blazes with the agony and ecstasy of rebirth. "We stand in the fusillade,/refusing to camouflage ourselves./Every bullet swallowed turns to gold in our bowels."

Colma
By John Laue. This chapbook from FutureCycle Press is named for a necropolis outside San Francisco, a city of cemeteries where the dead outnumber the living by 800 to 1. Yet Laue's poems are anything but morbid. Like the Biblical writer Ecclesiastes, this poet cannot erase his awareness of mortality by means of religious rituals or hopeful platitudes, but finally finds a precarious peace in appreciation of the present moment, and a substitute for immortality in the cycles of nature.

Common Carnage
By Stephen Dobyns. His ninth book of life absurd, and fascinating... "Two barn owls discuss Descartes as they/disembowel a field mouse without the help/of knife or fork. They are friends and/share even the tastiest bits. For instance,/each gets one lung. Sum, says one. Ergo/cogito, says the other. Then they chuckle./The night is cold; the fields are white...."

Crazy Love
By Pamela Uschuk. This poetry collection is enlivened by twin passions for social justice and the beauties of the Colorado landscape. In these poems, nature always provides a restorative place of peace and abundance when the wartime news becomes overwhelming. Uschuk is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Cutthroat.

Crime Against Nature
By Minnie Bruce Pratt. Politically urgent but never one-dimensional, in language that's always clear but never pedestrian, this groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life. Connecting her loss to other forms of oppression and violence against women, she dares to dream of a world that "will not divide self from self, self from life." This collection was originally published in 1989 by Firebrand Press and won the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize, a second-book award from the Academy of American Poets. A Midsummer Night's Press, in conjunction with the lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom, reissued it in 2013 in an expanded edition with historical notes and an author essay.

Dance and Disappear
By Laura Kasischke. Winner of the Juniper Prize. These poems radiate joy and spiritual insight.

Darker
By Mark Strand. The former US Poet Laureate needs no introduction, but this early collection (1970) deserves to be rediscovered. Other poets use images as metaphors; in "Darker", the images are the raw sense data of a surreal, often sinister new universe. "My neighbor marches in his room,/ wearing the sleek/ mask of a hawk with a large beak." Dare to enter the "phantasmagoria" (Howard Bloom's description) of the poet's mind.

Degrees of Latitude
By Laurel Blossom. A woman's life unfolds in this finely crafted book-length poem, composed of found texts, fragments of conversation, and images recollected with the context-free vividness of a dream. Blossom takes on weighty subjects like divorce and alcoholism at a slant, breaking them apart into sentences separated by daring associative leaps, like the scattered impressions that a child might gather but be unable to process.

Deposition
By Katie Ford. Intense, sometimes cryptic verse explores the title's dual meanings of a witness statement and the removal of Christ from the cross. Ford's poetry occupies the territory between crucifixion and resurrection, a "dark night of the soul" that ruthlessly clears the ground for faith without making any cheery promises. Another must-read for poets working on spiritual themes.

Detour
By Nancy White. This poetry collection explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman's identity in the middle of her life, through a son's birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet's hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person's experience. This feat is accomplished through White's use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty.

Enola Gay
By Mark Levine. Dazzling imagination of a post-apocalyptic world. Here is experimental verse that never becomes detached from its foundation in raw personal emotion and political outrage.

First Rain
By Francine Witte. The poems in this chapbook are spare yet filled with longing, like the empty rooms in an Edward Hopper painting. Their narrators reach for the unsentimental wisdom to be found on the far side of divorce, aging, and other losses. This collection won the 2009 Pecan Grove Press National Chapbook Competition. High-quality book design enhances the appeal.

Folding Ruler Star
By Aaron Kunin. Described by its author as "a value-neutral 'Paradise Lost'," this distinctive poetry collection explores the free-floating shame that arises from our simultaneous desires for connection and self-protection. Objects acquire human faces and vulnerabilities, while human faces are deconstructed into schematics ("five security zones"). The book is comprised of paired poems with the same title, enacting the imperfect mirroring of the self in intimacy with another. Runner-up for the 2006 Fence Modern Poets Prize.

Folly Bridge
By M. Lee Alexander. This poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press charms the senses with narrative poems that sing the particular music of locales ranging from Oxford to the Kansas prairie. One can hear the splash of the oars in the languid call-and-response of "Punt House, River Cherwell", or the off-key enthusiasm of the Midwestern mother in "Roxie Margaret Mouths the Words", who gives her children the gift she was denied, the belief that everyone deserves to find their voice. Alexander creates characters that will remain in readers' hearts.

For Girls (& Others)
By Shanna Compton. Two centuries of advice for girls, from Victorian health texts to Internet chat rooms, get remixed and satirized in this playful poetry collection with an underlying serious question: how to secure a space of enjoyment and dignity when one's identity is continually subject to public judgment.

Forms of Gone
By Yerra Sugarman. The poetic equivalent of a Chagall painting, this collection by a daughter of Holocaust survivors pays homage to the burdens and treasures of Jewish history. "I hoped to become one/ on whom nothing would be lost."

From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New & Selected Poems
By Charles W. Pratt. This delightful first volume in Hobblebush Books' Granite State Poetry Series offers formal verse that is light-footed, elegant, and full of surprises. Many of Pratt's poems concern his work as an apple-grower in New Hampshire, describing the farming life with humor, wistfulness, and reverence. There are also poems of family life, European travel, meditations on aging and the mystery that lies beyond.

Heaven
By Jill Alexander Essbaum. Sensual, joyous and profound poems make Christian ideas and images fresh again. Required reading for all poets seeking a modern idiom for the language of faith.

How the Boy Might See It
By Charlie Bondhus. Finding one's identity is just the beginning of the struggle in this poet's first full-length collection, which incorporates his chapbook 'What We Have Learned to Love'. With lyricism and an empathetic imagination, Bondhus claims a place for himself within multiple traditions, daring to juxtapose a comic tryst with a resurrected Walt Whitman, a disciple's erotic memories of Jesus, and the lament of a post-Edenic Adam.

In the Collage of Life
By William Schulman. Artistically designed limited- edition chapbook pairs poetic reflections with intricate abstract pen-and-ink drawings and collages suggesting forms from nature. Schulman keeps alive the tradition of books as art objects, creating an "illuminated manuscript" with a decisively modern feel.

In the Ghost-House Acquainted
By Kevin Goodan. Prizewinning first collection of poetry depicts the farming life unsentimentally yet with wonder at the mysteries of birth, death and transcendence. The language of these poems can be as stark and rugged as a Massachusetts winter, then blossom forth with the joy and terror of encountering the sacred in the cycles of nature. This book won the 2004 New England/New York Award from Alice James Books and the 2005 L.L. Winship award from PEN/New England.

Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize Anthology 2010
Edited by Michael Linnard. This engaging and accessible anthology features the winners and numerous runners-up from the first year of this contest, sponsored by a small press in Connecticut whose motto is "Delight, entertain and educate". Well-known contributors include Ed Frankel, Diane De Pisa, and A.D. Winans, alongside a number of writers who are just beginning their literary careers. A concluding section is devoted to the rediscovery of lesser-known authors including Jon Norman, Richard Harteis (partner of the late William Meredith), and Vernice Quebodeaux. The authors' bios are often as colorful as the poems themselves.

Love Poem to Androgyny
By Stacey Waite. Fierce, tragicomic poetry chapbook voices the struggles and desires of a lesbian whose masculine appearance leads her (not always voluntarily) to adopt alternate identities in response to others' preconceptions. This writer's fertile imagination was formed by a hostile world in which one best expresses one's true self by wearing a mask. "Who will believe us that deception is only/ a matter of cutting through the red tape?"

Maine
By Jonah Winter. Offbeat offerings in this winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize include "Hair Club for Corpses" and a sestina in which every line ends with "Bob". Winter can switch from serious to humorous and back again in a blink: "Everyone's losing at something./ It just matters more to some people, for example, Orpheus/ or Ty Cobb."

Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo
No modern poet captured the essence of a place as well as 20th-century master Richard Hugo, whose tightly paced free verse reveals the dignity of America's forgotten towns.

Monsters and Other Lovers
By Lisa Glatt. Raw, sensual, touched with bittersweet humor, Glatt's poems take an unflinching look at women's bodies experiencing love and death.

My Favorite Apocalypse
By Catie Rosemurgy. The enticing title says it all: this author embraces all the joys and sorrows of the body, flamboyant as a rock musician yet wryly wise as a philosopher. Unusual juxtapositions abound, but her words always discover that they enjoy each other's company.

No Loneliness
By Temple Cone. A sacred quiet permeates this debut poetry collection, winner of the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Abandoned barns are Cone's churches; the steady rhythms of farm work, his liturgy. The birth of a daughter is both miracle and memento mori, a sweet paradox held together in an extended lyric poem that envisions poetry as a transmission of love across generations.

No Sweeter Fat
By Nancy Pagh. The briny tastes and stormy weathers of the Pacific Northwest permeate this first poetry collection, voiced by a woman whose appetites for food and love are more than the world allows. These poems speak honestly of loneliness and pleasure. Winner of the 2006 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest.

Nobody's Mother
By Lesl�a Newman. This award-winning author's autobiography in verse is narrated in a likeable voice that will resonate with a wide audience. Themes include feminism, aging, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, and nostalgia for Jewish culture along with a critique of its patriarchal and warlike aspects. Along the way, Newman offers such delights as an ode to the now-shuttered Second Avenue Deli, and a playfully erotic exploration of middle-aged love.

Observatory
By M. Lee Alexander. Clear-sighted, modest and wise, the narrator of these poems takes us to London, China, Japan, and post-Katrina New Orleans, always with an eye for the moments of common humanity that open up intimacy between strangers.

Operation Memory
By David Lehman. Second collection by well-regarded poet and critic is intellectual without being pretentious, full of witty surprises and self-mocking cultural observations. "Many are called and sleep through the ringing."

Pretty Tilt
By Carrie Murphy. This debut poetry collection effervesces with teen-girl sexuality, its narrator unapologetic in her desire to inhabit this body, this stage of life, this cultural moment, without weighing it down with analysis. Feminism makes a token appearance as a source of self-criticism that she's thrown aside like a bikini top at the beach. Her self may be socially constructed out of crusty panties and My Little Pony hair, but unlike the Gurlesque poets to whom she's been compared, Murphy doesn't seem angry or anxious about the impossibility of some Modernist "authenticity"; for her characters, girlhood holds thrills but no serious dangers. Read it for her fantastic language and perceptiveness about the emotions of this time of life.

Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006
By Carl Phillips. Intricate lyrics from the poet's eight collections marry austere classicism to sensual passion. Eros, for Phillips, is always shadowed by loss, yet for that very reason also points to a radiant, barely describable landscape beyond death, as the speaker of these poems renounces all illusions about the cost of his devotion to another man.

Red
By Melanie Braverman. Lesbian poet's first collection moves easily between the erotic and the elegiac in a voice that is fresh and wide-open as her Cape Cod landscape. Braverman invites the reader into a community of friends and lovers who embrace life despite the risk of loss. Elegantly designed by Perugia Press, this book won their 2002 contest as well as the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Prize.

Scattered Risks
By Pamela Uschuk. Like a modern St. Francis, this poet is a sister to all the beasts and plants that grace her southwestern landscape, and unfailingly finds the perfectly textured and surprising words to bring them to life for the reader. Uschuk is a prophet of the wilderness that we are fast destroying; few poems pass without a reminder of the human warfare and greed that lurk at Eden's edge. She invites us to feel the "velvet shoulders" of the bat rays in the aquarium's touch pool, then to question our right to have "these benign inmates confined to concrete/ entertaining us with their lives." Totemic illustrations by James G. Davis enhance this volume from Wings Press, Texas' oldest small press.

Searching for the Spring: Poetic Reflections of Maine
By Ken Nye. Plain-spoken, meditative poems bring to life the culture and terrain of rural Maine, and demonstrate the spiritual rewards of love and attention to one's native landscape.

Slouching Towards Guantanamo
By Jim Ferris. In his second full-length collection from Main Street Rag, Ferris interrogates America's concept of "the normal" and finds it wanting. His own disability is the lens through which this prophetic poet brings every other shade of inequality into focus, asking us to shed the burden of our ego so that differences between ourselves and others can simply coexist without comparison or judgment. Notwithstanding the spiritual weight they carry, these poems are playful, musical, satirical and passionate.

Sonatina
By Johnmichael Simon. This award-winning Israeli poet's new collection pairs themes of high art and nature's simple beauty. By turns political, pastoral and erotic, Simon uses musical metaphors to evoke compassion and nostalgia for his homeland and its people.

Sonnets from Aesop
By Judith Goldhaber, illustrated by Gerson Goldhaber. Witty sonnets by an award-winning poet retell 100 fables from Aesop, including many lesser-known tales worth rediscovering. Lively watercolor illustrations for each tale are sure to delight both adults and children. A great read-aloud book. 'Sonnets from Aesop' received an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) as one of the ten "Outstanding Books of the Year" published by an independent press in 2005. Acclaimed formalist Annie Finch says, "What more could Aesop have wished than to address the 21st century in these dry, whimsical sonnets complemented by a series of soft, edgy watercolors. This beautifully produced book is a rare treat."

Soot
By Jeff Walt. Plain-spoken and passionate narrative poetry in the tradition of Philip Levine seeks out moments of tenderness and joy amid the grit and grind of mass society. Co-winner of the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Prize from Seven Kitchens Press.

Steel Womb Revisited
By M. Scott Douglass. Plain-spoken poetry stands up for working-class America with humor, lucidity, and political outrage. Douglass is the publisher of the acclaimed small press Main Street Rag.

Subject to Change
By Marilyn L. Taylor. Accomplished collection of lively contemporary formal verse, ranging from a punning ode to the Nissan Stanza to a crown of sonnets that depicts the birth of feminism ("Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963").

Sun, Moon, Salt
By Nancy White. Winner of the 1992 Word Works Washington Prize, this debut collection was reissued in 2010. If this book could be summed up in one word, it would be the title of the opening poem, "Tongue", that place where language and sex meet. White delights in the body's unique shapes, textures, and tastes, inviting us to experience familiar features as strange and wonderful. The generous range of these poems also extends to Northeastern small-town life, the constraints of female roles, and a grown woman's empathetic insights into her parents' struggles.

Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body
By George Estreich. This poet's voice is eminently likeable, humble and wise. Whether he is finding spiritual wonder in nature's complexity, or working his way to reconciliation with aging parents, Estreich's gift for elegant and original phrases never seems like showing off. This book won the 2003 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition from Cloudbank Books.

The Book of Folly
By Anne Sexton. The mother goddess of female confessional poets, Sexton brings back the truths that lie on the other side of madness. The sonnet sequence "Angels of the Love Affair" presents a visceral depiction of psychosis that is almost unbearably real.

The Carcinogenic Bride
By Cindy Hochman. When the Big C meets the Big D, all you can do is laugh. At least, that's where poet Cindy Hochman's survival instinct takes her. Packed with more puns than a Snickers bar has peanuts, this chapbook from Thin Air Media Press brings energetic wit to bear on those modern monsters, breast cancer and divorce. To order a copy ($5.00), email Cindy at poet2680@aol.com.

The Case Against Happiness
By Jean-Paul Pecqueur. The genially bewildered characters in this unique first collection of poetry try and fail to fit themselves into the American dream of personal satisfaction, but only because they are genuinely groping for a more substantial mode of existence that always remains just beyond the margins of thought and language. Pecqueur's wild associative leaps mirror his inability to find the coherent, contented self that the Enlightenment promised. This book won the 2005 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books.

The Cow
By Ariana Reines. The Cow is like putting Western Literature through a sausage-making machine. The Cow is about being a girl and also a person. Is it possible? "Alimenting the world perpetuates it. Duh. Plus 'the world' is itself a food." The integrated self equals sanity and civilization (whose machinery creates the slaughterhouse), yet the body is constantly disintegrating, eating and being eaten, being penetrated and giving birth. With manic humor and desperate honesty, Reines finds hope by facing the extremes of embodiment without judgment or disgust. Winner of the 2006 Alberta Prize from FENCE Books.

The Dead Alive and Busy
By Alan Shapiro. These carefully structured poems, tinged with classical allusions, honor the sick and dying with the poet's patient vigil and unflinching observation of the body's joys and failures. Winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award.

The Divine Salt
By Peter Blair. The spirit of St. Francis of Assisi presides over these plain-spoken poems, written from the perspective of a mental hospital orderly. Blair's kind and understated voice is a refreshing contrast to the melodramatic tone of much poetry about mental illness.

The Feast: Prose Poem Sequences
By Walter Bargen. A modern-day Jonah leads us from the belly of the whale into surreal cityscapes, sinister carnivals, and intersections with the world of Greek myths. Winner of the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award for best poetry book by a Missouri writer. Read more of Bargen's work on our 2005 War Poetry Contest winners page.

The Glass Violin
By P.S. Cottier. This Australian poet truly does see the universe in a grain of sand--as well as in a tram ticket, a Caesarian scar, the names of Australian military operations, a shabby bear in the Soviet zoo, a wren visiting a dead friend's garden, and myriad other small details of modern life that she turns into windows on the human condition, in verses both whimsical and profound.

The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats
By John Surowiecki. Rich with local detail, these elegiac poems capture a working-class Polish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and pay tribute to neighborhood characters who are lovingly individuated yet acquire universal resonance from the way the poet brings their ordinary lives to light. The mood of aging and decline is leavened by a sense that love is as real as pain. This book won the 2006 Word Works Washington Prize.

The Hospital Poems
By Jim Ferris. A powerful contribution to the literature of disability, this autobiography in verse exposes a childhood spent at the mercy of medical "experts", who performed invasive and ultimately futile surgeries to correct his uneven legs. With dark humor and an insistence on facts over rhetoric, Ferris restores dignity to the bodies of those whom the establishment treats as problems to be fixed. This book won the 2004 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.

The Imaginary Poets
Edited by Alan Michael Parker. The brilliant idea behind this Tupelo Press anthology: ask 22 leading poets to invent an alter ego, "translate" one of his or her poems, and write a short bio and critical essay about the "author". From David Kirby inventing a lost Scandinavian language for his fisherman-poet "Kevnor", to Victoria Redel discussing the feminist implications of the poems "Tzadie Rackel" sewed into her dishrags, these deadpan critical essays play with the conventions of academic poetry and criticism, in the same way that Cindy Sherman's imaginary film stills trick us into "recognizing" characters and poses that are so archetypical that we think we've really seen the movie. If you've ever found the museum placards more interesting than the modern art they describe, this book will make you laugh and think.

The Job of Being Everybody
By Douglas Goetsch. The craftsmanship of these poems sneaks up on you, colloquial free verse initially disguising the deep intelligence of their observations about human nature. "You can know your building if you're interested/ in sadness," he writes of New York apartment life. How grateful we should be that he takes an interest.

the lake has no saint
By Stacey Waite. Repeated images of old houses, vines, and being underwater give this poetry chapbook the blurry, yearning atmosphere of a recurring dream, where one searches for the lost or never-known phrase that would make sense of a cloud of memories. Even as Waite offers compelling glimpses of discovering a masculine self within a body born female, womanhood exerts its tidal pull through domestic scenes with a female lover who seems perpetually on the verge of vanishing. This collection won the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award from Tupelo Press.

The Most of It
By Mary Ruefle. Like Socrates, the narrator of these engaging prose-poems asks innocent-seeming questions about our habitual ways of thinking, but the reader who takes up the challenge will find the territory shift suddenly from featherbrained whimsy to a profoundly unsettling realization of the emptiness of language and the ego, ending with a return to childlike humility that facilitates a spiritual awakening.

The Next Ancient World
By Jennifer Michael Hecht. Winner of the Tupelo Press Judge's Prize in Poetry. Historian of science applies her rational and witty perspective to our dilemmas at the turn of the millennium.

The Owl Question
By Faith Shearin. Lyrical imagery full of personal wisdom characterizes this winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award. Shearin can be bluntly honest about our flaws and disappointments without sounding cynical. "My mother once explained:/ we can't all be beautiful; even a gaunt field/ feels the cold kiss of morning."

The Radiant
By Cynthia Huntington. Austere moments of beauty illuminate this collection whose theme is finding peace in the midst of suffering. Though battered by a lover's betrayal and the onset of multiple sclerosis, the speaker of these poems is renewed by the transcendent qualities of nature and her own courage in seeing clearly. Winner of the 2003 Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.

The Real Politics of Lipstick
By Mary Carroll-Hackett. Winner of the 2010 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Competition, this collection of prose poems and flash fictions is indeed about the "realpolitik" of our sexuality as it collides with poverty and loss and makes a beautiful explosion. Dead fathers return as jaunty ghosts, budding teenagers remind mothers of the sexy stockings they renounced, tough girls find power in submission and abandonment. This is the honky-tonk woman as sacred prostitute, speaking in tongues as men "plowed away the weight of hard hurt lives" in union with her body but not, perhaps, her elusive soul. Small typeface makes the page look less inviting, but close reading will be rewarded.

The Voodoo Doll Parade
By Lauren Schmidt. The profane becomes sacred under this poet's unflinching attention, in earthy poems about illness, sex, and prayer (and sometimes all three tangled up in bed together). The heart of this chapbook is a series of unforgettable narratives about homeless and mentally disabled clients of The Dining Room, a soup kitchen in Oregon where the author volunteered. This book was selected by Terry Wolverton for the Main Street Rag Author's Choice Chapbook Series.

The World's Wife
By Carol Ann Duffy. The wives of mythic figures get their say at last.

Unraveling at the Name
By Jenny Factor. Speaking in sonnets seems as natural as breathing for this author, whose effortless mastery of poetic forms is employed to tell the story of a young woman's discovery of her lesbian identity. Some explicit passages.

Up from the Root Cellar
By Anne Harding Woodworth. The root vegetable, as metaphor for the unearthing of secrets and the renewal of aging bodies, unifies this satisfying chapbook from Cervena Barva Press. In Woodworth's inventive poems, nuns peeling potatoes could be fantasizing about Marilyn Monroe's striptease; a woman puzzled by hints of her father's infidelity might try to call her childhood home by speaking into a rose shaped like an antique telephone.

Waiting to Burn
By Angela Cleland. Memorable chapbook whose poems are always about so much more than their literal subject matter. Cleland trusts her readers to recognize the story of an unhappy marriage in a cat's transformation into a dog, or the divine-human power struggle over forbidden knowledge in a guided tour of a factory. This book was one of the three winners of the 2006 Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection Competition. Their book design and materials are above-average.

What She Said
By Lisa Suhair Majaj. Provocative poetry chapbook by a Palestinian-American writer whose creative and academic work on Middle Eastern and women's issues has been widely anthologized. The title poem in this collection was a finalist in our 2004 War Poetry Contest.

What the Living Do
By Marie Howe. Autobiographical collection is an elegy to the poet's brother, who died young from AIDS. These verses are poignant and true.

What We Have Learned to Love
By Charlie Bondhus. Raw, tender poems of gay male love and lust, and the blurry line between them. This chapbook won the 2008-09 Stonewall Competition from BrickHouse Books.

Women Writing in Prison
Edited by Jacqueline Sheehan. Powerful, heartfelt poems and prose by 95 incarcerated women from the Voices From Inside project. This anthology has received high praise from Billy Collins and Ellen Dore Watson among others. Voices From Inside, located in western Massachusetts, facilitates writing workshops with women in prison, encouraging them to write their stories in their own unique voices. This volume brings the women�s writing into the larger community, promoting a deeper understanding of the human costs of incarceration. All profits from book sales support the program. Copies are $17 plus $3 shipping; make checks out to 'Amherst Writers & Artists Press' and mail to Voices from Inside, P.O. Box 60443, Florence, MA 01062. Email codirector Carolyn Benson for more information and discounts on bulk orders.

Jendi's Own Poetry

A Talent for Sadness
Turning Point Books published A Talent for Sadness in the fall of 2003, Jendi Reiter's first solo collection of poetry. This collection is a hard look at the demands and challenges of love, and has been praised by such noted poets as Jennifer Michael Hecht. "Jendi Reiter's poems are smart about nature and humanity. In one deft move wet leaves are said to hang heavily on their branches: 'the way a lazy hand hangs over the edge of the bed.' Reiter's poetry is full of such observations and are alive with curiosity about experience and ideas. There's a lot of trouble here too, a 'bound bride,' a 'woman left on the ground,' a diver who goes so far down he can breathe again. Human life is hard here, but the poems always find relief in the return to the natural world and to the world of thought." Featured on Verse Daily, 11/4/03.

Barbie at 50
Jendi Reiter's second award-winning chapbook won the 2010 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Contest. Notable poet Afaa Michael Weaver calls this collection "poems of a life more real than any doll's, as they point up the grace of having confronted the problematic entanglements that attempt to derail a woman making her way through the puzzles of maturing in the last fifty years". Experienced editor Lori Desrosiers calls it "an inventive re-imagining of the fairytale woman...replete with surprise and peppered with humor."

Miller, Reiter & Robbins: Three New Poets
A collection by Jendi Reiter, Derek Miller and Tim Robbins, all discovered by Hanging Loose magazine. "Distinctive voices even in their earliest efforts." Order directly from Jendi Reiter for $9.

Swallow
This chapbook by Jendi Reiter won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize from Amsterdam Press. Award-winning poet Ellaraine Lockie says of this collection, "Jendi Reiter's poems are arrows that plunge dead center into the hearts of feminism, religion, death, the interior of mental health and psychotherapy. Her humor and satire here are as sharply honed as her indignation." Email the author for purchasing information.

Recommended Fiction

A Changed Man
By Francine Prose. Part novel of ideas, part romantic comedy, this book begins with a young skinhead walking into the office of World Brotherhood Watch, a human-rights group run by a Holocaust survivor, and saying he wants to help them "save guys like me from becoming guys like me." The events that follow reveal each character to be a very human mix of vanity and genuine altruism, with the latter most often emerging in small moments away from the spotlight. The novel raises provocative questions about the tension between service to grand causes and caring for the individuals in one's personal life, though Prose could have accomplished more with this theme by introducing a true villain to raise the stakes in the conflicts between characters.

A Working Man's Apocrypha
By William Luvaas. In this short story collection, tornados real and metaphorical rip through the lives of not-so-ordinary people, flinging them into unexpected intimacies and tearing away identities once thought airtight. Luvaas' poetic prose is powerful as the Santa Ana winds yet delicate enough to limn the silences that speak louder than words, as in the title story, where the bond between a widow and her dying handyman is too profound to risk actual words of love.

Award-Winning Tales
Edited by R.L. Coffield. This enjoyable collection of short fiction in the Western genre features the top stories from the Cowboy Up contest sponsored by Moonlight Mesa Associates. The book includes adventure tales, humor, and romance, in settings both modern and historical.

Best American Short Stories 1999 (The)
Edited by Amy Tan and Katrina Kenison. A particularly fine installment of this annual series, the 1999 anthology includes a wide spectrum of styles and ethnic backgrounds, with emotionally compelling tales that leave the reader with much to ponder. Standouts include Nathan Englander's 'The Tumblers', which casts the shadow of the Holocaust over Yiddish folklore's mythical village of Chelm; Sheila Kohler's 'Africans', a quietly chilling account of a family's disintegration under apartheid; and Heidi Julavits' 'Marry the One Who Gets There First', an unlikely love story told through wedding-album outtakes.

by George
By Wesley Stace. In this enchanting, multifaceted novel, a shy boy begins to uncover the secrets of his family of vaudeville performers when he finds a ventriloquist's dummy belonging to his late grandfather. (In keeping with his family's off-kilter understanding of reality, the boy was named after the dummy.) A shift from magical realism to psychological realism halfway through the book may at first disappoint fans of the former genre, but ultimately fits perfectly with the human George's choice to break the family pattern of sacrificing truth to illusion.

Cold June
By Francine Witte. The men and women who populate this flash fiction chapbook don't have much time. They do desperate, magical, outrageous things to bridge the all-too-ordinary distances between them, the indifference of lovers and the clumsiness of communication. The rare happy marriage can almost survive the world's end, it seems, whereas for many others, even a trip to outer space won't rekindle the fire. This chapbook won the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award from RopeWalk Press.

Earth Abides
By George Stewart. A classic in science fiction's end-of-the-world genre. As much wisdom about philosophy and society as you'll find anywhere, all in a gripping novel that never flags.

Enlarged Hearts
By Kathie Giorgio. This gorgeous collection of linked stories from Main Street Rag is comprised of variations on the theme of the Fat Girl. All the unnamed protagonists share this mythic epithet and all are employed at the Large & Luscious Large Women's Clothing Boutique in a prototypical shopping mall, but beyond that, they are individuals who gloriously resist social stereotyping and invisibility.

God Is an Englishman
By R.F. Delderfield. Richly detailed, lively historical novel set in Victorian England, starring a visionary entrepreneur who founds a haulage firm. The careers of Adam Swann's nine children are a microcosm of British society at the turn of the century, while his wife Henrietta combines femininity and independence in a way that many modern women might envy. One of the best fictional portraits I've seen of a strong marriage and how it changes over time. This is the first book in a trilogy; the other books are Theirs Was the Kingdom and Give Us This Day.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
By Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. In this hilarious fantasy novel, an angel and a devil try to stave off the apocalypse because they enjoy life on earth too much. Along the way, the authors slip in some profound insights about the necessary balance between the light and the dark sides of human nature.

Kissing in Manhattan
By David Schickler. Brilliantly written novel-in-stories seduces the reader with witty sketches of Manhattanites in love and lust, but what began as social comedy ends as a surprisingly moving tale of darkness and redemption. Aspiring short story writers should study Schickler's way with the details that reveal character and milieu.

Lake Overturn
By Vestal McIntyre. This standout first novel paints a tender, comical portrait of an Idaho small town in the 1980s, where a motley collection of trailer-park residents yearn for connection (and sometimes, against all odds, find it) across the barriers of class, sexual orientation, illness, separatist piety, drug abuse, and plain old social ineptness. You'll want to linger on the luscious writing, but keep turning the pages to find out what happens to the characters who've won a place in your heart.

Lily's Odyssey
By Carol Smallwood. In this novel, a retired scholar in a working-class Midwestern town struggles to process her memories of childhood incest and unravel its effects on her psyche. This book's strengths are its sharp characterization of people and cultural settings, and the connections it draws between domestic abuse and sexist institutions that conspire to keep it secret. On her long journey to claim her truth, the narrator must rethink not only her family's official storyline of virtue and vice, but the messages from religious authorities and psychologists who dismiss a woman's perspective. Metaphors from her scientific research give her a creative way to resist. This book shows how trauma can give birth to an artist's intellect that notices and questions human behavior.

Mad to Live
By Randall Brown. A pregnant woman develops a craving for bugs. A couple bond over the failure of their wife-swapping party. A father consoles his child over the dinosaurs' extinction, while wishing his own parents had allowed him to believe in heaven. These are some of the seeds from which spring Randall Brown's quirky, brilliant, heart-rending short-short stories. This collection won the 2007-08 Flume Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Their book design is also a standout.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Edited by Kate Bernheimer. Dark, innovative, beautiful, strange variations on classic fairy tales from around the world. Some stories remain within the fantasy-horror genre, while others reenact the fairy tale's psychological themes in a contemporary realist setting. Each story is followed by the author's reflections on the source material and how it inspired them. Notable contributors include playwright Neil LaBute, poets Joyelle McSweeney, Kim Addonizio, and Sabrina Orah Mark, and fiction writers Michael Cunningham and Gregory Maguire. This book is not appropriate for normal children.

Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro. This quietly heartbreaking and provocative novel is equal parts British boarding-school story, dystopian science fiction, and Kafkaesque fable about conformity. While the premise (human clones harvested for their organs) seems ripped from the headlines, the absence of plausible science in the plot suggests that the clones are a metaphor for the myriad ways we sacrifice our human potential by failing to question authority.

Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction
Edited by Kate Wheeler. Innovative collection of short stories that integrate Buddhist precepts into contemporary settings. Some of the pieces use form as well as content to explore Buddhist concerns with present awareness and change.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
By Jeanette Winterson. This darkly comical autobiographical novel is narrated with deadpan wit but also a certain tenderness toward her own and her family's eccentricities. Raised by a fervent Pentecostal mother in a provincial British town, the protagonist finds her world shaken to its core when she discovers her attraction to other girls.

Pastoralia
By George Saunders. Enter the deranged theme park of this unique writer's imagination, in surreal tales that exaggerate the insincere cheer of mass-media corporate culture to show the ruthlessness beneath. Beneath Saunders' manic wit lies a fierce compassion for misfits waging a losing battle for authenticity in a world of manufactured messages.

Places in the Dark
By Thomas H. Cook. Brooding, poetic tale of two brothers whose love is shattered by their passion for the same woman. Cook exploits the conventions of the Gothic thriller to build up expectations that he constantly reverses with his surprising plot twists, ultimately producing a wise commentary on storytelling itself and how it both inspires and entraps us.

Riddley Walker
By Russell Hoban. Imagine the Bhagavad-Gita as a Punch-and-Judy show. What do the legend of St. Eustace and particle physics have in common? In this unique novel, part mystical treatise and part fantasy-horror fiction, two millennia have passed since a nuclear war knocked Britain back to the Iron Age, and a semi-nomadic civilization has preserved only degraded fragments of our science through oral tradition in the form of puppet shows. Our narrator, 12-year-old Riddley, at first joins forces with a shifting (and shifty) cast of politicos and visionaries who hope to bring the human race back to its former glory by rediscovering the recipe for gunpowder. But soon he's on the track of bigger game: the nature of reality, and the causes of sin. Which is more fundamental, unity or duality? Why does Punch always want to kill the baby?

Roots
By Alex Haley. Masterful saga of seven generations of an African-American family, beginning with Haley's Gambian ancestor who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the 18th century. Haley's fictionalized re-creation of their lives is rich with drama, humor, tragedy, political outrage, and love that defies the odds.

Ropeless
By Tracy Koretsky. Ropeless is a comic, poignant story about an old-fashioned Jewish mama, her mentally disabled son, and a dutiful daughter learning to follow her dreams. Told from multiple first-person perspectives, every character's voice is pitch-perfect. Koretsky is the winner of a dozen literary awards and has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. Fans of Wally Lamb will enjoy this new author.

Said and Done
By James Morrison. The stories in this collection from Black Lawrence Press explore the nuances of feeling and the power dynamics of intimate moments between family members, lovers, and strangers, in a way that is deeply insightful without over-explaining. Morrison's vision of human nature contains shades of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor, though written in a more restrained style. These stories always leave the reader with the sense that there is more to the characters than the chosen anecdote can reveal.

Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories
If there's hope for Harlan Ellison and his dark, existential science fiction, there's hope for us all. From the back cover, "When I told Houghton Mifflin that Jesus Christ had given me a quote to help promote Slippage, boy, did they go ballistic! It was a great quote, a real 'money quote'. Jesus said, 'I love Ellison's writing. I'd have a Second Coming, or even slouch toward Bethlehem, just to read this new collection!'"

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions
By Neil Gaiman. Author of the acclaimed 'Sandman' graphic novels mashes up literary classics, myths famous and obscure, and the conventions of the fantasy genre, with effects that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and always a witty tour de force. Some of the best selections derive their humor from the collision between the mythic and the mundane, as when an elderly British widow finds the Holy Grail in a thrift shop, or the inhabitants of H.P. Lovecraft's Innsmouth behave like characters in a Monty Python skit.

Ten Thousand Stories
By Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr. The cut pages of this illustrated book can be recombined to create a multitude of delightfully absurd tales. This particular offering is most suitable for adults, but Swanson and Behr, the husband-and-wife team behind Idiots' Books, also publish equally zany materials for children.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
By Michael Chabon. This Pulitzer-winning epic novel about the golden age of comic book superheroes is also a love song to New York City Jewish culture in the years surrounding World War II. Two boys, a visionary artist who escaped Nazi-occupied Prague and his fast-talking, closeted cousin from Brooklyn, lead the fantasy fight against Hitler by creating the Escapist, a superhero who is a cross between Harry Houdini and the Golem of Jewish legend. However, their real-world dilemmas prove resistant to magical solutions, and can only be resolved through humility, maturity, and love.

The Bean Trees
By Barbara Kingsolver. Written in 1988, the first novel by this now well-known author and activist is first of all a heartwarming and funny story about an unlikely "family of choice" formed by a single mother and her baby, a young woman fleeing her dead-end Southern town, and an abandoned Native American toddler. More ambitious than the typical "relationship novel", the story puts a human face on political issues like interracial adoption and the plight of South American refugees.

The Bride Price
By Barclay Franklin. Bittersweet romance set on the American frontier tells the story of a white woman and a half-Indian soldier who hope their love is strong enough to survive prejudice and the dangers of army life. The hero's seduction of a married woman is hard to square with his generally noble character, but his displays of leadership and grace under pressure are worth emulating.

The Chosen One
By Carol Lynch Williams. This chilling and all-too-real story takes place inside a fundamentalist polygamist cult in the Utah desert. Thirteen-year-old Kyra loves her extended family and tries not to question the elders' tightening grip on their lives, but when they command her to marry her 60-year-old uncle, she plans a desperate escape that could put her life at risk. Billed as a young adult novel, this book may be too disturbing for some readers in that age group.

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 6: The Crime Stories
By Louis L'Amour. The famed writer of Westerns was also a master of the hard-boiled crime story. These action-packed noir tales are populated with treacherous dames, mobsters, prizefighters, coal miners, scam artists, and decent guys trying to survive against the odds.

The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories
By Steve Almond. The often absurd and exaggerated premises of these witty tales heighten our compassion for the hapless protagonists who seek love and sex in urban America, but rarely hang on to either one for long. Almond chronicles life's freakshow in the same spirit as Flannery O'Connor's grotesque: to shock us into solidarity with one another and compassion for our abnormal secret selves.

The Girls Club
By Sally Bellerose. Winner of the Bywater Prize for lesbian fiction, this enjoyable and honest first novel follows three young working-class Catholic sisters as they navigate women's changing social roles in the 1970s. Cora Rose, the protagonist, comes to embrace the aspects of herself that she once struggled to hide: her chronic illness and her desire for other women. In prose that is electric with wit and longing, Bellerose shows how the ones who drive us crazy are the ones we can't live without.

The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. In 1962, the civil rights movement has barely touched the ladies of Jackson, Mississippi, who continue to treat their African-American maids like dirt--that is, until one misfit heiress with journalistic ambitions convinces the longsuffering housekeepers and nannies to share their anonymous testimonies in a book that will scandalize the community. Though the novel's neat happy ending could be considered too "Hollywood", this tale of interracial friendship is inspiring and enjoyable.

The Home for Wayward Clocks
By Kathie Giorgio. In this beautiful and innovative novel, an abused boy becomes a recluse who lavishes all his human warmth on the clocks he rescues and repairs for his museum. But a disabling accident, and the arrival of an abused teenage girl who needs his help, compel him to reach out to his neighbors and learn to trust again. His storyline is interspersed with the stories of the clock-owners.

The Memory of Earth
Orson Scott Card's insight into relationships is unexcelled. You care for his characters. The Memory of Earth is the first of Card's Homecoming Series. The Ender Series is equally compelling.

The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver. In this novel, a dangerously naive American missionary family is swept up into the turmoil of the Congo's independence from Belgium in 1960. Each of the multiple narrators speaks with a poetry all her own, and voices a different way to make sense of this clash of cultures. Despite the violence and injustice that the family witnesses, and in which they become complicit, the world they inhabit is anything but meaningless, though it may be a meaning that does not have the white race, or even the human race, at the center. Kingsolver combines a prophet's rage with a mystic's delight in small miracles such as the jungle's fertile ecosystem and the generosity of starving villagers.

The Position
By Meg Wolitzer. Witty novel chronicles the romantic travails of the authors of a 1970s sex manual and their four children, who are first mortified by their parents' unabashed passion, then wounded and disillusioned by their divorce. Wolitzer treats her characters' failings tenderly, managing both nostalgia for the Free Love generation's idealism and clear-sighted compassion for the Generation X'ers living in the wreckage of sexual utopia. The style is so light and clever that one realizes only later how many deep truths have been communicated.

The Sparrow
By Mary Doria Russell. Members of a Jesuit-led expedition to another planet face the ultimate test of their wisdom and endurance when they encounter two intelligent alien species, one of which uses the other as both servants and prey. This well-written novel and its sequel, Children of God, raise profound questions about the spiritual meaning of suffering and the unforeseen consequences of our actions.

The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe: And Other Stories of Women and Fatness
Edited by Susan Koppelman. This important anthology from The Feminist Press spans a century of women's short fiction. The large women who populate these stories may be sensual goddesses, lesbian feminists, sideshow performers, battered wives, or troubled teens, but each poses a question about our discomfort with embodiment and female power. A bonus feature of this anthology is an excellent critical essay by Koppelman, a literary historian and the leading expert on short fiction by US women. View her author page at The Feminist Press website for other themed anthologies in this series.

The Three Great Secret Things
By Anthony S. Abbott. Gentle, profound coming-of-age story about an orphan boy in postwar America and his introduction to the mysteries of sex, love, art and faith. The boarding-school setting allows insightful readings of literary classics and Christian beliefs to be skillfully woven into the narrative. Readers of all ages will feel for young David Lear as he matures from observer to author of his own life, with help from a strong-willed, unforgettable girl. This book is the sequel to 'Leaving Maggie Hope' but can be enjoyed on its own.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
Edited by Tobias Wolff. Every story is a masterpiece of voice, setting, and emotional depth in this collection of short fiction from the 1970s and '80s. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Mary Gaitskill, Ron Hansen, Chris Offutt, Susan Power and John Edgar Wideman. This anthology stands out for the genuine diversity of its authors and subject matter (race, class, gender, location, historical period) and the absence of intellectual anomie and cynicism: something truly human is at stake in every tale.

The Whore's Child and Other Stories
By Richard Russo. Deftly drawn portraits of intimate relationships explore how the people closest to us may be the most mysterious. In the title piece, an elderly nun in a fiction writing class writes her memoirs in defiance of the teacher's expectations, but the exercise reveals that the true story is different from what she had thought it to be. Other pieces gently probe the strengths and weaknesses of long-married couples, and how they are held together as much by the fictions they believe as by the truths they know about one another.

This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon
By Linda McCullough Moore. This luminous collection of linked stories takes the risk of positing a universe where tragedy and confusion do not get the last word. The narrator's acerbic wit and unsparing assessments of human nature, particularly her own, earn credibility for the moments of grace that always break in to redeem her family's love-hate relationships.

Till We Have Faces
By C.S. Lewis. In this fantasy novel loosely based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, an unloved queen recounts her grievances against the gods, only to discover the struggle between selfish and unselfish love in her own soul. This is Lewis' most "feminist" book, showing a remarkable grasp of women's experiences in a male-dominated society.

William Trevor: The Collected Stories
Small masterpieces of melancholy from acclaimed Irish writer. Like a scalpel, Trevor's prose is delicate yet piercing, exposing unnamed but all-too-familiar psychological truths about his characters and ourselves.

XX Eccentric: Stories About the Eccentricities of Women
Edited by S. Craig Renfroe, Jr. This short fiction anthology from Main Street Rag celebrates the creativity and perseverance of women who don't play by normal rules. The eclectic cast of characters includes an HIV-positive senior citizen, a spunky lesbian drama teacher fighting her school's bureaucracy, and a teenage girl with a crush on Abe Lincoln.

You Are Not a Stranger Here
By Adam Haslett. Flawless prose captures emotions that are almost too subtle for words. Though his dark themes may seem familiar to readers of literary fiction (several tales feature bereavement and mental illness), these stories shine with moments of wisdom discovered and hard-won love, lifting them far above most examples of the genre.

Recommended Nonfiction

A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation
By Noah Lukeman. More than just a style guide, this book discusses how creative writers can use punctuation for artistic effect. Lukeman, a literary agent and author of bestselling writing manuals, explores such questions as how dashes enhance Emily Dickinson's poems, or how Melville used semicolons to convey tension in Moby-Dick. Includes writing exercises.

A Story Is a Promise & Deep Characterization
By Bill Johnson. This readable guide to plotting a work of fiction helps you identify the human need that your story promises to fulfill, and the actions that will advance that goal. Johnson, a script doctor, uses examples from action movies like 'Rocky' and 'The Hunt for Red October' to illustrate the different elements of a story. Whereas many writing manuals focus on the micro-elements of the scene (dialogue, setting, characterization), Johnson looks at the macro-elements, the "why" rather than the "how", in a way that will help any novelist wondering which scenes to include in her next draft.

Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution
This extraordinary collection of personal essays by inmates of a maximum-security women's prison in Connecticut was edited by bestselling novelist Wally Lamb, who teaches a writing class there. Poignant, humorous, lively and unique, these narratives challenge us to reform a system that treats the authors as less than human.

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
By H.G. Bissinger. This book by a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer inspired the hit movie and TV series. The Permian Panthers' season-long battle to reach the 1988 state high school football championships becomes a microcosm of racial and economic tensions in a West Texas town where the boom-and-bust of oil wealth has left many without a clear vision for their future.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
By Alison Bechdel. This outstanding memoir, written as a graphic novel, intertwines the author's coming of age as a lesbian with her memories of her brilliant, enigmatic, repressed father, who died in an accident that she suspects was suicide. Drawing parallels to sources as diverse as Joyce, Colette, Proust, classical mythology, and 'The Wind in the Willows', she shows how their shared love of literature substituted for the intimacy they could never express in more personal terms. Bechdel is the author of the long-running "Dykes to Watch Out For" comic strip.

Help: The Original Human Dilemma
By Garret Keizer. Personal and philosophical meditations on the paradoxes of help - why we offer it, why we need it, and what makes it effective (or not). A former Episcopal priest and English teacher, Keizer has a sparkling aphoristic prose style worthy of G.K. Chesterton, but also a winsome humility that prefers a balance of opposites rather than a neat solution. Everyone should read this book.

If a Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard
By Jennifer Rosner. When her first daughter was born deaf, memories of feeling unheard by her own mother led Rosner to trace the history of deafness in her family and imagine how love might bridge the communications gap between parents and children. This beautifully constructed memoir from Feminist Press touches on themes of assimilation, identity formation, and healing. Interwoven with Rosner's tender and humorous memories of her children's early years are vivid fictionalized scenes of her Jewish immigrant ancestors, whom she imagines wrestling with the same challenges in a very different cultural setting. The technology and politics of deafness may keep changing, this book suggests, but the need to connect with the ones we love is universal.

In My Father's House: A Memoir of Polygamy
By Dorothy Allred Solomon. This insightful, compassionate memoir tells of growing up within a breakaway fundamentalist Mormon sect that considered plural marriage a holy obligation. A theology of eternal family bonds, combined with the need to hide from persecution, drew her father's many wives and children closer together but also stifled their self-development. Amid the upheaval of social roles in the 1960s and '70s, the author strives to discover her own connection to God without rejecting her people. Personal narrative is well-balanced with historical background. First written in 1984, this book was reissued in 2009 by Texas Tech University Press.

Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith
By Martha Beck. Part memoir, part religious history, this compelling, controversial book by a Harvard-educated sociologist describes the fallout from her recovered memories of sexual abuse by her father, a leading Mormon scholar. Her anger is leavened by compassion as she delves into the complicity of a secretive church culture in creating and shielding abusers with split personalities. Though the topic is a dark one, readers who accompany Beck on her healing journey will be rewarded with her account of her strengthened connection to God's love and her own inner truth.

Love in the Western World
By Denis de Rougemont. Bold, original study of the invention of courtly love and its echoes in high and low culture through the centuries. Themes include the tension between romance and marriage, romantic ecstasy as substitute for religion, and the craving for union with the beloved as a disguised longing for self-annihilation. Nonscholars may skim some of the historical passages, but poets and fiction writers alike will benefit from reexamining the origins and implications of the romantic values we take for granted.

Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun
By Faith Adiele. In this profound, witty memoir of spiritual transformation, an intense, high-achieving, activist intellectual goes to Thailand to research the unequal status of women in Buddhist religious life, but unexpectedly finds inner peace during her stint as a member of an ascetic order of nuns. The elegantly designed book pairs her current reminiscences with excerpts from her journals, side by side on the page like a Talmudic commentary.

Model
By Cheryl Diamond. There's more to this teen memoir than meets the eye. Beautiful, blonde Cheryl has a wise old head on her shoulders, which helps her survive encounters with all sorts of human predators as she tenaciously builds a career as a fashion model in New York City. She's also a sharp, funny writer.

Mythogyny: The Lives and Times of Women Elders in B.C.
Edited by the WE*ACT Editorial Collective (Elsie Dean, Alegria Imperial, Jan Westlund, and Sandi Wingrove). This anthology of oral histories by senior citizens in British Columbia, Canada, paints a collective portrait of resourceful working-class women who survived poverty, sexism, and the failure of their illusions about marriage and family security.

Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
By Reginald Shepherd. This selection of autobiographical and critical essays by an award-winning poet eloquently explores how the poetic imagination fruitfully problematizes the self, potentially liberating us from fixed identities based on race, class, sexual orientation and personal history.

Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples
By Rodger Streitmatter. This compendium of brief, lively biographical sketches of 19th and 20th century American innovators showcases the unsung contributions of their same-sex partners. In addition to well-known duos like Stein and Toklas, the book gives "the rest of the story" for luminaries such as the president of Bryn Mawr and the founder of the field of interior design. Some of the profiles could have benefited from more discussion of how the unconventional relationship passed muster in an era when homosexuality was not only stigmatized but illegal. Overall, the anthology is an entertaining and upbeat read that whets the appetite for reading longer biographies of these notable figures.

Roman Lives: Coriolanus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Mark Antony
By Plutarch (Mestrius Plutarchus). This Naxos Audiobooks abridgment dramatizes key episodes in the Roman Republic's transition to dictatorship, with lessons about pride, honor, and worldly vanity that are still relevant today. Plutarch pioneered the genre of biography in the West with his lives of Greek and Roman leaders.

Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
By David Lovelace. This memoir of mental illness stands out for its lyricism, humility, tenderness, and deeply sane sense of humor about how the author and his family have romanticized their affliction. Lovelace is a poet and the son of a notable evangelical theologian. Both of his parents are bipolar, as are the author and his brother. With refreshing honesty, he traces mania's connection to spiritual and artistic creativity, yet concludes that the private ecstasies of madness lead to incoherence, not a deeper truth.

She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders
By Jennifer Finney Boylan. This witty and eye-opening memoir describes one person's experience of being transgender. James Finney Boylan was a published novelist and English professor who had tried all his life to suppress his feeling that he was female inside. Finally, at age 40, he began the process of transition, leading to an upheaval and rearrangement of his family life, depicted here in anecdotes both comical and sad. Some will feel that the real hero of the tale is the author's wife, who lovingly supported Boylan's transition despite her pain and anger at losing the man she married. Boylan's hilarious narrative voice is the book's chief strength; its weakness is an absence of in-depth reflection on where our ideas of "male" and "female" identity come from.

The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
By Daniel Mendelsohn. Provocative, elegant memoir explores gay male desire, the mythic allure of doomed love, and the creative tensions of a life divided between incompatible worlds. Mendelsohn is a classics professor at Princeton, and some of his most interesting reflections involve the application of Greek myths to modern homosexual culture, and the contrast with his family-oriented Jewish heritage.

The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong
By Jennifer Michael Hecht. Engaging history of cultural and philosophical prescriptions for a happy life, which have differed widely from one era to the next. Hecht suggests that historical perspective itself brings happiness by giving us self-awareness and the ability to try new options outside our culture's standards of value. The wit and geniality she displayed in her prizewinning poetry collection 'The Next Ancient World' lend credibility to her advice on the good life (or rather, lives).

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell
By John Crawford. This hard-hitting memoir by a young veteran of the 2003 Iraq war portrays a failed system of military leadership that exposed infantrymen to pointless risks as their mission became increasingly unclear. Crawford joined the Florida National Guard before 9/11 for the tuition benefits, then found himself unexpectedly shipped to Kuwait. Scarcity of men and materials meant that his unit's tour of duty was continually being extended, yet they were not given the tools to do the job. Crawford's writing captures the brusque camaraderie and profanity-laced talk of soldiers, while his literary prose brings these harsh scenes to life.

The Right Stuff
By Tom Wolfe. No one understands the American alpha male like Wolfe, who brings his boisterous journalistic voice to the story of the first astronauts. Published in 1979, this book has aged well, and reads now as a commentary on the brevity of fame as well as an incomparable glimpse into the Cold War zeitgeist.

Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men
Edited by Brian Bouldrey. Contributors to this profound and heartfelt anthology of spiritual memoirs include Mark Doty, Andrew Holleran, Alfred Corn, Fenton Johnson, and Lev Raphael. The authors touch on such topics as the connection between spiritual and erotic ecstasy, family secrets and reconciliations, and AIDS as a modern crucible of faith.