Resources
From Category: Books
The Girls Club
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 Glass Violin
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 Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong
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 Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats
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 Help
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
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 Hospital Poems
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 Houses Along the Wall: A Pembrokeshire Poetry Cycle
By Karen Hayes. With stately cadence and tender attention to detail, this poetry chapbook imagines personal histories for a row of old houses in a Welsh seaside village, where a dwindling community depends on tourism to replace the fishing economy. The style and setting have the flavor of T.S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages", without the philosophical pomposity.
The Imaginary Poets
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
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
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 Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell
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 Little Mermaid
By Jerry Pinkney. Hans Christian Andersen's tragic fairy tale is reconceived by acclaimed author-illustrator Pinkney as an empowering fable about friendship, exploration, and the power of a girl's voice. Lush paintings in gold and blue tones, featuring Black characters, make this one of the most delightful retellings of a famous story. Definitely superior to the Disney version, or at least an essential text to have on hand when your child watches the movie.
The Malevolent Volume
By Justin Phillip Reed. This award-winning Black queer poet's sophomore collection gives a furious and brilliant voice to the shadow side of literary classics from Homer to Plath. The syntax of this poetry collection is thorny and twisted, and the word choice demands slow re-reading to discern the full meaning and appreciate the muscular rhythm. Reed is fond of using words that could be either nouns or verbs, placing them in such a way that you would mistake one for the other until the context becomes clear. One could see this style as a political choice in keeping with the book's passionate reclaiming of Blackness as an aesthetic. Reed is asserting that he deserves the reader's close attention. He is as important, and as intellectually accomplished, as the writers in the white literary canon that these poems deconstruct with wicked cleverness.
The Meadow
By Scott A. Winkler. Old-fashioned and wholesome, this Vietnam War era coming-of-age novel reminds us that there was more to America in the late 1960s than the coastal counterculture. The eldest son of small-town Wisconsin dairy farmers, high school graduate Walt Neumann is torn between his dreams of becoming a college-educated writer and his rugged, taciturn father's demand that his sons carry on his legacy of military service. Not your typical rebel, Walt deeply honors his family's traditions of hard manual labor and service to the place they call home, but grows to understand that the traumatic stories locked inside the stolid "Greatest Generation" veterans may be preventing an entire nation from learning from its errors. Beautiful writing and sensitive character portraits make this meditative novel a good opener for blue- and red-state Americans to start understanding each other.
The Moon Reflected Fire
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.
The Most of It
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 Mountain in the Sea
By Ray Nayler. This compelling hard-science thriller is set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind's aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. But rather than pitting humans against nature, the multi-layered and well-researched plot comes down to two theories of consciousness: the colonialist quest for knowledge-as-control, or empathy across the mysterious divide of self from other. The stakes are nothing less than human survival on the planet.
The Next Ancient World
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 Opposite of People
By Patrick Ryan Frank. Blank verse and loosely structured sonnets eloquently explore the yearnings we express through TV and movie archetypes. Sincerity and contrivance are not opposites here. The comedian, the stunt man, the late-night movie monster, and the bad-news blonde take their turns revealing the existential paradox of film: how it underscores the passage of time by freezing it on the screen, a fixed point against which we measure our real lives racing past like "a car with its brake lines cut". Frank's blend of wry conversational tone and formal meter harks back to W.H. Auden, but his aesthetic lineage is more Disney than Brueghel: "About violence they were never wrong,/the old cartoons."
The Owl Question
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 Pillow Book
By Jee Leong Koh. The design of this illustrated Japanese-English edition has a studied casualness that suits these subtle, charming poems. Koh writes of male-male eroticism without the gritty explicitness or florid imagery that often prevail in this genre. Everything is enjoyed in moderation yet savored to the fullest. Literary sketches of his native Singapore combine the sensory immediacy of childhood memories with an expatriate's wry detachment.
The Poetry of Derrick Brown
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.
The Poisonwood Bible
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
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 Prince and the Dressmaker
By Jen Wang. In this perfectly heartwarming graphic novel, set in "Paris at the dawn of the modern age", a special friendship blossoms between a cross-dressing teenage prince and the working-class seamstress who guards his secret. By day, Prince Sebastian dodges his parents' efforts to set him up with eligible young ladies, while by night, he dazzles as fashion icon Lady Crystallia. Meanwhile, Frances wonders how she can achieve her dreams of success as a fashion designer without exposing her royal client's secret. All ends happily in a tale that is suitable for both YA and adult readers.
The Prophets
By Robert Jones Jr. Set on a Mississippi plantation, this devastating yet life-affirming novel centers on the forbidden love of two young Black enslaved men. Multiple perspectives reveal how sexual violation and erotic entanglement give the lie to the brutally maintained separation of Black and white, as well as the complex uses of Christianity to comfort the oppressed while muting their rebellion. Interspersed with the deadly despair of the plantation scenes are hopeful visions of pre-colonizer African cultures that respected queer identities, a legacy that finds expression in the main characters' pure bond.
The Question Authority
By Rachel Cline. This slim, incisive, timely novel of the #MeToo Movement explores the long aftermath of a popular teacher's serial predation on tween girls in a 1970s Brooklyn private school. Two middle-aged women, once childhood best friends, find themselves on opposite sides of another sexual misconduct case because of the different psychological strategies they employed to cope with their victimization. The Question Authority fearlessly examines the gray areas of consent, understanding that young women routinely overestimate how much choice and objectivity they could really bring to a relationship with an older male mentor.
The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind
Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, & Max King Cap, eds. An essential anthology of poetics and politics in the 21st century, this essay collection from Fence Books grew out of Rankine's "Open Letter" blog that solicited personal meditations on race and the creative imagination. Contributors include poets Francisco Aragón, Dan Beachy-Quick, Jericho Brown, Dawn Lundy Martin, Danielle Pafunda, Evie Shockley, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and many more, plus contemporary artwork selected by Max King Cap. The writers span a variety of ethnic backgrounds, points of view, and aesthetics, united by honest self-examination and political insightfulness.
The Radiant
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
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 Reformatory
By Tananarive Due. This gripping ghost story was inspired by a real-life ancestor of the author's, who died in a reformatory in the Jim Crow South. "Haints" are the least of Robbie Stephens' problems when he's sent to a sadistic juvenile prison for a trumped-up offense against a white boy in the rural Florida of 1950. The town's white power brokers want to use him as a pawn to bring his father out of hiding; Klansmen and police alike are gunning for Robert Senior because of his work organizing millworkers and registering Black voters. Meanwhile, Robbie's teenage sister and her 80-year-old godmother are discovering that even NAACP lawyers aren't a match for the racist judicial system. Freeing Robbie will require supernatural intervention.
The Right Stuff
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.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
By Deesha Philyaw. These bittersweet stories immerse the reader in the lives of Black women struggling against patriarchy and hypocrisy. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and secret queer lovers weigh the risks of authentic intimacy versus passing on patterns of repression to the next generation in order to keep them safe. Philyaw's debut book was a National Book Award finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Prize winner.
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal
By Jonathan Mooney. In this affecting and funny road-trip memoir, the author decided to fight his internalized ableism as a former special-education student by traveling through America in an old schoolbus to meet other neurodivergent and learning-disabled people. His personal experiences are interwoven with historical background on the social construction of conditions such as autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia, with suggestions for how we might frame cognitive differences in a less judgmental way.
The Smoke of Dreams
By Reena Ribalow. This stately, melancholy collection of poems is steeped in sensual memories of bittersweet love, be it for a holy city or a forbidden affair. Her roots are planted in Jerusalem, sacred and war-torn, harsh and captivating. Her more personal poems show the same mix of pleasure and pain in romantic relationships. One way or another, history is inescapable.
The Sparrow
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 Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
By Theodora Goss. Suspenseful but basically light-hearted, this series opener is a fun feminist talkback to the Victorian literary tradition of mad scientists who viewed women as raw material for monstrosities. The daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde team up with the Bride of Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne's poisonous Beatrice Rappaccini, and other not-quite-human women from Gothic fiction to track down a secret society that is performing murderous experiments. The third-person narrative includes frequent first-person intrusions by the characters, teasing each other or disputing how the story is framed. Some might find this editorializing a little too cutesy, as it does lower the dramatic stakes by reassuring the reader that the whole team survives to the end of this adventure. However, the style has the serious purpose of offering an alternative to the solitary hegemonic perspective of the male genius, as well as highlighting its monstrous heroines' common origins in the Victorian Gothic fear of hybridity. Not enough plot threads are resolved at the end, in order to leave an opening for the next book—a structural weakness, but one that does not unduly diminish the reader's warm feelings as the book closes.
The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe: And Other Stories of Women and Fatness
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 Taxidermist’s Cut
By Rajiv Mohabir. Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for this ambitious, passionate debut poetry collection: a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. (Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana's sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida.) The poet is willing to lay his own veins bare in order to create an artifice that is painfully and beautifully true to life. This book won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize.
The Three Great Secret Things
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 True
By Sarah Kornfeld. A darkly humorous cautionary tale for the post-truth era, this work of narrative nonfiction recounts Kornfeld's quest to comprehend the life and death of her former lover and mentor, renowned Romanian theatre director Alexandru Darie. Passionate and enigmatic, Darie was generous with his attention but secretive about the alcohol abuse and political trauma that fatally affected his health. Visiting Romania shortly after his death in 2019, Kornfeld falls under the sway of a volatile young woman who claims to have been his girlfriend. The onset of COVID in early 2020 adds another layer of distance and mystification to their correspondence, as Kornfeld, back in America, becomes enmeshed in elaborate online negotiations to produce a book and TV series about Darie. When the whole enterprise is revealed to be a hoax, Kornfeld must face how grief led her to search for answers where there were none—a parallel to her country's plunge into simplistic conspiracy theories and quick-fix politics.
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
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 Voodoo Doll Parade
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 Whore’s Child and Other Stories
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.
The Wishing Tomb
Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, this exquisite collection surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each poem.
The Witch Boy
By Molly Knox Ostertag. This lovely middle-grade graphic novel features a youth whose magical skills transgress the gender roles of his community. All the girls in Aster’s extended family are supposed to become witches, and the boys, animal shapeshifters who defend them from evil spirits. However, Aster’s passion is for witchery. With the help of Charlie, a non-magical girl from the neighboring suburb, he uses his forbidden talent to fight a monster in a way that only he can. Charlie, who has two (off-page) dads, is uniquely sympathetic to Aster’s dilemma because she’s a female athlete struggling for equal opportunities at her school. Both children are people of color, and Aster’s extended family includes a variety of ethnicities. The artwork, in cozy earth tones, is clear and expressive, and not too scary for younger readers.
The World’s Wife
The wives of mythic figures get their say at last.
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
By Stephen Dobyns. Poet and noir mystery novelist Dobyns branches out into philosophical farce in this ensemble-cast comedy set in early 1990s New York City, where wrestling matches re-enact early Christian disputes about the nature of evil, and anyone's life might unwittingly mimic a Grimm's fairy tale. What holds this capacious story together is the idea that truth is only manifested through artifical personae and constructed narratives—what wrestlers call their Gimmicks—and if there is free will, it consists of noticing your Gimmick and maybe choosing a different one.
Thief in the Interior
By Phillip B. Williams. This debut collection from Alice James Books is a formally innovative, visceral and intense collection of poems through which the American tradition of violence against gay and black male bodies runs like a blood-red thread. From concrete poetry collages to experimental sonnets, Williams makes us contemplate murder as a twisted outburst of intimacy across caste lines, and love as a battle cry. Winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
