Diane Seuss continues to astonish me with her daring. There's a sort of unspoken rule to not write poems about poetry yet Seuss devotes a whole collection to this endeavor and does so with insight and humor. The personal aspects of her education—her unlikely journey to this so-called high artform—are also moving. These are smart but also accessible poems that I'd recommend to anyone. My favorite book of the year by one of my favorite living poets.
Diane Seuss's signature voice-audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude-has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft-ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda-and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented.…
I picked The Sentence as my first spooky season read because it's a ghost story. It's not a ghost story like any I've encountered before, though. The protagonist, Tookie, is arrested for moving a dead body, an act that haunts her even after her release and happy marriage to her arresting officer. (Yes, really.) But that metaphorical haunting encounters a real one. Now working at a bookshop, Tookie can't shake a dead patron who simple will not leave the store or her alone. This original tale is told against the backdrop of world-altering events in 2020, including the Covid pandemic and George Floyd protests. Erdrich captures so many of the emotions we experienced that year while centering a Native American experience.
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but…
If somebody had told me about the blender scene in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, I would have passed. I'm glad that I didn't. Jones is the sort of sarcastic, flawed hero I truly can't get enough of. She has superpowers, but not enough to be on lunchboxes. A superhero underdog—what's not to like? Breaking the Dark is the first Marvel novel, and it focuses on Jones and a new case. Something wonky is going on with two teenagers who've recently returned from spending a summer with their dad abroad. There are plenty of twists and turns but enough character development to elevate this story to something special.
"Absolutely perfect." —Booklist "Fresh, lively, insightful—astonishing." — AJ Finn
In her most imaginative novel yet, #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell (None of This Is True) launches the Marvel Crime series of thriller books for adults with an original story starring the private detective Jessica Jones.
Meet Jessica Jones: Retired super hero, private investigator, loner. She tried her best to be a shiny spandex crimefighter, but that life only led to unspeakable trauma. Now she avoids that world altogether and works on surviving day-to-day in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.
The morning a distraught mother comes into her office,…
Wildlife technician Essa Montgomery worries that she'll always be "the serpent orphan" if she stays in Vintera, West Virginia. Her neighbors will never forget that her snake-handling mother and father were both killed by cottonmouths. A fire at her old church pulls her into an improbable investigation alongside hotshot reporter Merritt Callahan and into direct conflict with the new preacher, a man the town considers a hero for fighting the local opioid epidemic.
When the pastor offers Essa a devil's bargain, will she accept the offer to save her brother? This literary mystery takes its inspiration from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, using a modern setting to ask an age-old question about the limits of mercy.
