New Books in 2012 by authors represented by BFA
DIANE ACKERMAN, Nonfiction (ppb): 100 Names For Love (Norton)
One day Ackerman's husband, Paul West, an exceptionally gifted wordsmith and intellectual, suffered a terrible stroke. When he regained awareness he was afflicted with aphasia—loss of language—and could utter only a single syllable: "mem." The standard therapies yielded little result but frustration. Diane soon found, however, that by harnessing their deep knowledge of each other and her scientific understanding of language and the brain she could guide Paul back to the world of words. This triumphant book is both a humane and revealing addition to the medical literature on stroke and aphasia and an exquisitely written love story: a magnificent addition to literature, period. |
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AMY BLOOM, Children's Book: Little Sweet Potato (HarperCollins)
Text to come. |
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AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, Nonfiction: This is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. (St. Martin's Press)
To say that Augusten Burroughs has lived an unusual life is an understatement. From having no formal education past third grade and being raised by his mother’s psychiatrist in the seventies to enjoying one of the most successful advertising careers of the eighties to experiencing a spectacular downfall and rehab stint in the nineties to having a number one bestselling writing career in the new millennium, Burroughs has faced humiliation, transformation and everything in between. Told with Burroughs's unique voice, black humor, and in-your-face advice, This is How is Running With Scissors—with recipes. |
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ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Fiction: The Hot Country (Grove/Atlantic)
The Hot Country will begin the Christopher Marlowe Cobb thriller series, to be published by Otto Penzler's The Mysterious Press. It is told in the voice of a swashbuckling early 20th century American newspaper war correspondent, whose voice Butler created for the story “The One in White” in Had a Good Time. Printed in the Atlantic Monthly, that story won (along with the Atlantic) a National Magazine Award in fiction. The Hot Country is set in Mexico in April and May of 1914, during that country’s civil war and the American invasion of Vera Cruz. The second novel in the series will be published in the fall of 2013. |
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| PETER COLE, Poetry: The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale University Press)
This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry that emerges directly from the sublime and often startling world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem’s call to plumb the “tremendous poetic potential” concealed in the Kabbalistic tradition, Peter Cole provides dazzling renderings of work composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years. In addition to the translations and the texts in their original languages, Cole supplies a lively and insightful introduction, along with accessible commentaries to the poems. Aminadav Dykman adds an elegant afterword that places the work in the context of world literature. As a whole, the collection brings readers into the fascinating force field of Kabbalistic verse, where the building blocks of both language and existence itself are unveiled.
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KWAME DAWES, Anthology: Hold Me to an Island: Caribbean Place (Peepal Tree Press)
Exploring the relationships between the Caribbean people and their environment, this anthology brings together poetry, fiction, and other pieces of prose that focus on the Caribbean’s natural and manmade environments with an insider point of view. The writings are divided by relating to various places, including constructed, intimate, and natural ones, in addition to the flora and fauna of the region, which has, in some cases, taken on iconic significance. This collection gives a true insight into both the Caribbean landscape and its corresponding mindscape.This anthology brings together poetry, fiction and other prose that explores the relationship between Caribbean people and their environment, both man-made and natural. The anthology deals with constructed places such as the plantation, the village and the city, intimate places such as houses and yards, and natural ones such as the sea and wilderness. The last section focuses on the idea of journeying as a matter of personal transformation.
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KWAME DAWES, Anthology: A Bloom of Stones: A Tri-lingual Anthology of Haitian Poems After the Earthquake (Peepal Tree Press)
A Bloom of Stones collects the work of more than thirty Haitian poets, many who live in Haiti and others who are part of the large Haitian diaspora. Among this list are many of Haiti’s most celebrated poets as well as some of the country’s as yet unpublished younger poets. The poems offer a complex and sophisticated range of responses to the earthquake – poems about the rupture of love, the shock of sudden disaster, the hunger for more beauty in the world, the shattering of landscapes, and ultimately, poems that explore the incomprehensible nature of our mortality. Presenting French and Haitian Kreyol poems alongside their English translations, this tri-lingual anthology is a necessary bridge across languages in the poly-lingual Caribbean, and introduces readers to some exciting Haitian voices. Ultimately, these poems offer, in the midst of tremendous tragedy, a capacity to find beauty, where beauty constitutes truth, even harsh truths, elegantly rendered.
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CLAUDIA EMERSON, Poetry: Secure the Shadow (LSU Press)
Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson’s Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet’s brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson’s unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.
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FORREST GANDER, Translation: Watchword by Pura Lopez Colome (Wesleyan)
In her most recent book, Watchword—the winner of the Villaurrutia, Mexico's most esteemed literary prize—acclaimed poet Pura Lopez Colome writes of life at its brink with fierce honesty and an unblinking eye. This work shares the darkness, intensity, and skeptical hope of Thomas Hardy's great poems. Like them, Lopez Colome's poems have flashes of secular mysticism, sparked from language itself, which generate unforgettable passages and give voice to a world familiar and odd, wounded and buoyant. In the energy and intensity of her work and in her exhilarating words, we discover both a line of conduct and the source for a richer life. This bilingual edition features the poems en face in Spanish and English.
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JORIE GRAHAM, Poetry: P L A C E: New Poems (Ecco)
In P L A C E, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience—increasingly devalued by a culture that regards them as “mere” subjectivity—aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation and a political reality where the human person and its dignity are increasingly disposable. Throughout, Graham seeks out sites of wakeful resistance and achieved presence. From the natural world to human sensation, the poems test the unstable congeries of the self, and the creative tensions that exist within and between our inner and outer landscapes—particularly as these are shaped by language.
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JOY HARJO, Memoir: Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton & Co)
In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. She attended an Indian arts boarding school, where she nourished an appreciation for painting, music, and poetry; gave birth while still a teenager; and struggled on her own as a single mother, eventually finding her poetic voice. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice. Harjo's tale of a hardscrabble youth, young adulthood, and transformation into an award-winning poet and musician is haunting, unique, and visionary. |
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PAM HOUSTON, Fiction: Contents May Have Shifted (W.W. Norton & Company)
Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, "feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer." She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan. Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession. At last, having found a new partner "who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL" and a daughter "who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself"-not to mention two dogs and two horses-"staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe." |
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ETGAR KERET, Fiction: Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (FSG)
Part Kafka, part Vonnegut, with the concerns and comedic delivery of Woody Allen, Etgar Keret is a brilliant and original master of the short story. Hilarious, witty, and always unusual, declared “a genius” by The New York Times, Keret brings all of his prodigious talent to bear in Suddenly, A Knock on the Door, his sixth bestselling collection. Long a household name in Israel, where he has been declared the voice of his generation, Keret has been acknowledged as one of the country’s most radical and extraordinary writers. Exuding a rare combination of depth and accessibility, Keret’s tales overflow with absurdity, humor, sadness, and compassion, and though their circumstances are often strange and surreal, his characters are defined by a familiar and fierce humanity. Suddenly, Knock on the Door is at once Keret’s most mature and most playful work yet, and establishes him as one of the great global writers of the twenty-first century. |
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TED KOOSER, Children's Book: The House Held Up by Trees (Candlewick Press)
When the house was new, not a single tree remained on its perfect lawn to give shade from the sun. The children in the house trailed the scent of wild trees to neighboring lots, where thick bushes offered up secret places to play. When the children grew up and moved away, their father, alone in the house, continued his battle against blowing seeds, plucking out sprouting trees. Until one day the father, too, moved away, and as the empty house began its decline, the trees began their approach. At once wistful and exhilarating, this lovely, lyrical story evokes the inexorable passage of time - and the awe-inspiring power of nature to lift us up. From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Ted Kooser and rising talent Jon Klassen comes a poignant tale of loss, change, and nature's quiet triumph.
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TAYLOR MALI, Poetry: What Teachers Make (Penguin)
The right book at the right time: an impassioned defense of teachers and why our society needs them now more than ever. Former middle-school teacher and teachers' advocate Taylor Mali struck a chord with his passionate response to a man at a dinner party who asked him what kind of salary teachers make—a poetic rant that has been seen and forwarded millions of times on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Based on the poem that inspired a movement, What Teachers Make is Mali's sharp, funny, reflective, critical call to arms about the joys of teaching and why teachers are so vital to America today. It's a book that will be treasured and shared by every teacher in America-and everyone who's ever loved or learned from one. |
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RICK MOODY, Nonfiction: On Celestial Music (Back Bay Books)
Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and On Celestial Music provides an ample selection from that effort. His anatomy of the word "cool" reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat, "a grunt of assent." "On Celestial Music," which was included in Best American Essays, 2008, begins with a lament for the loss in current music of the vulnerability expressed by Otis Redding's masterpiece, "Try a Little Tenderness;" moves on to Moody's infatuation with the ecstatic music of the Velvet Underground; and ends with an appreciation of Arvo Part and Purcell, close as they are to nature, praise, "the music of the spheres." Modern groups covered include Magnetic Fields, Wilco, Danielson Famile, The Pogues, The Lounge Lizards, and Meredith Monk, who once recorded a song inspired by Rick Moody's story "Boys." Always both incisive and personable, these pieces give us the inspiration to dive as deeply into the music that enhances our lives as Moody has done--and introduces us to wonderful sounds we may not know. |
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MEIR SHALEV, Fiction (ppb): The Loves of Judith (Schocken)
When the mysterious Judith arrives in a small agricultural village in Palestine in the 1930s, she attracts the attention of three men: Moshe, a widowed farmer; Globerman, a wealthy cattle dealer; and Jacob, who loses his wife--the most beautiful woman in the village--because of his obsession with Judith, who insists on living in a cowshed rather than settling down with any of her admirers. When she gives birth to Zayde, all three suitors consider him their son, and all help father him when Judith dies. Zayde, who narrates the story as an adult, carries a legacy from each man, but it is Jacob, who invites Zayde to a special meal once every decade, who helps him piece together the beguiling story of the singular woman who was his mother. Meir Shalev combines magical realism with the joys and secrets of village life in this novel of an unconventional family and the unexpected fruits of love. |
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DAVID SHIELDS, Anthology: FAKES: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Dubious Documents (Norton)
Text to come. |
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PATRICIA SMITH, Poetry: Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press)
In her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl." |
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MICHAEL THOMAS, Memoir: The Broken King (Grove Atlantic)
Michael Thomas’s extraordinary new book, The Broken King, traces the lives of the men in his family against the backdrop of the last century-and-a-half in American history. From Reconstruction to the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights movement, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and beloved, trauma and recovery, race and deracination, success and failure, soccer and the Boston Red Sox in a beautiful and unique memoir. Reminiscent of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Thomas delivers a series of powerful vignettes reaching back to his grandfather who, though trained as a pharmacist, could never find work as one; his father, the president of his class at Boston University, an artist and philosopher who was an unsuccessful businessman and a failed parent; his estranged brother’s lawlessness; and his own two sons’ relatively privileged and safe lives in Brooklyn today. |
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NATASHA TRETHEWEY, Memoir (ppb): Beyond Katrina (University of Georgia Press)
Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.
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NATASHA TRETHEWEY, Poetry: Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces—across time and space—that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and classification, exposing the way they encode ideas of race within our collective imagination. While tropes about captivity, bondage, inheritance, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey, by reflecting on a series of small estrangements from her poet father, comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.
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KEVIN YOUNG, Nonfiction: The Grey Album (Graywolf)
Taking its title from Danger Mouse’s pioneering mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album, Kevin Young’s encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, “jazzing.” What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.
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C.K. Williams, Poetry: Writers Writing Dying
Text to come. |
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C.K. WILLIAMS, Essays: In Time
Text to come. |
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FORTHCOMING IN 2013
DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN Fiction: I. Want. You. To.
BENJAMIN PERCY Fiction: Red Moon (Grand Central/Hachette)
JOSHUA FERRIS Fiction: The Third Bishop (Little, Brown)
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