Serious poets seldom write loud jokes, but the self-mocking disingenuous note of "Little Boat"‘s title poem nicely captures the tact of this collection of occasional poems, many reprinted from The Columbia Poetry Review and The New... Read More

The 2006 winner of the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award, this debut collection mines a neglected niche of literary territory—working-class Eastern Kentucky—in much the same way that Alice Munro explored rural Canada, with the... Read More

Of the 10,000 novels published by legitimate American imprints this year (almost one an hour!), few will greatly profit either their author or publishing house. The book trade is historically poorly paid and genteel. A solitary writer,... Read More

Brave indeed is the novelist whose gregarious, anxious, polyglot alter-ego (yes, his name is Ernest) dares to anatomize—even celebrate—that peculiar inertia of beginning to write. In this novel, inspiration eluding the narrator in... Read More

East of Eden and south-south-west of Chicago, Old Kane, Illinois in 1948 is a tiny yet teeming crossroads of family strife, populated by amiable prodigal sons, practical-sounding patriarchs, and the women who love them. Its denizens?... Read More

In both her life and her narrow but vivid body of work, Carson McCullers claimed a secure (albeit marginal) perch in American literature’s Southern renaissance Gothic wing. More so than with her kinswomen Flannery O’Connor and Eudora... Read More

Welcome to Swinging London, circa 1720. A dyspeptic poet (Alexander Pope, in charming cameo) proves how appearances must indeed govern reality, for women now fit their amoral conduct to follow their dressmakers’ sumptuary, immodest... Read More

The author notes a curious confluence early on in this generally praiseworthy set of essays, before he abandons altogether the inferences of his provocative subtitle. Arbery cites some damning local press that Nobel Laureate Seamus... Read More