New Books in 2013 by authors represented by BFA
ROGER BONAIR AGARD, Poetry: Bury My Clothes (Haymarket Books)
Bury My Clothes is a meditation on violence, race, and the place in art at which they intersect. Art—specifically in oppressed communities—is about survival, Roger Bonair-Agard asserts, and establishing personhood in a world that says you have none. Through poetry, we transform both the world of art and the world itself.
|
 |
STEPHEN BURT, Poetry: Belmont (Graywolf Press)
In Belmont, Stephen Burt maps out the joys and the limits of the life he has chosen, the life that chose him, examining and reimagining parenthood, marriage, adulthood, and suburbia alongside a brace of wild or pretty alternatives: the impossible life of a girl raised by cats, the disappointed lives of would-be rock stars, and the real life to which he returns, with his family, in the town that gives the book its name, driving home in an ode-worthy silver Subaru. Can a life be invented the way a poem can? What does it mean for a precocious child, or a responsible grown-up, to depict the world we want? With wit, beauty, tenderness, and virtuosity, these poems define the precarious end of extended adolescence, and then ask what stands beyond.
|
 |
KWAME DAWES, Poetry: Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon)
Born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica, and educated in Canada, Kwame Dawes is a dynamic and electrifying poet. In this generous collection, new poems appear with the best work from fifteen previous volumes. Deeply nuanced in exploring the human condition, Dawes’s poems are filled with complex emotion and consistently remind us what it means to be a global citizen.
|
 |
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Poetry: The Bees (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of new poems as British poet laureate. The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, and poems of political anger. There are elegies, too, for beloved friends and—most movingly—for the poet’s mother. As Duffy’s voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies, and every poem patterns itself into song. Woven into and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy’s subject, sometimes it strays into the poem or hovers at its edge—and the reader soon begins to anticipate its appearance. In the end, Duffy’s point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect. The Bees is Duffy’s clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as “secular prayer,” as the means by which we remind ourselves of what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.
|
 |
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Poetry: Rapture (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
The effortless virtuosity, drama, and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy’s verse have made her much admired among contemporary poets. Rapture is a book-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony. But what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is Duffy’s refusal to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations—infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancor, separation, and grief—as either redemptive or destructive. This is a map of real love in all its churning complexity, simultaneously direct and subtle, showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives. With poems that will find deep resonance in the experience of most readers, it is a collection that can and does speak for us all.
|
 |
PERCIVAL EVERETT, Fiction: Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf Press)
A story unfolds inside a story as a man visits his aging father in a nursing home. Each man tells overlapping tales: A painter meets a long-lost daughter. A man named Murphy can’t distinguish between the brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. Anecdotes from the nursing home intertwine and crest in a wild excursion of the inmates. All the while a running commentary from father and son anchors the shifting plotlines and sheds doubt on their truthfulness. A powerful meditation on the humiliations of old age, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this, his most important and elusive novel to date.
|
 |
NICK FLYNN, Memoir: The Reenactments (W.W. Norton)
For Nick Flynn, the game we all play―the who-would-play-you-in-the-movie-of-your-life game―has been answered. The Reenactments is the story of adapting Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, into a film called Being Flynn. It is also a searing meditation on consciousness, memory, and grief. Flynn describes the surreal experience of being on the film set during two reenactments of central events in his life: his father’s long run of homelessness and the suicide of his mother. He tells the story of Robert DeNiro’s first meeting with his father in Boston and of watching Julianne Moore attempt to throw herself into the sea. Expanding on the themes raised by these reenactments, Flynn weaves in meditations on the enigmatic Glass Flowers exhibition at Harvard University, alongside Ramachandran’s experiments with sufferers of phantom limb syndrome, to create a compelling argument about the eternal nature of grief.
|
 |
FORREST GANDER, Poetry: Eiko & Koma (New Directions)
For over thirty years, the Japanese-born choreographer/dancers Eiko & Koma have created an influential theatre of movement out of stillness, shape, light, and sound. In tribute and collaboration, acclaimed American poet Forrest Gander has written a mesmerizing series of poems—hinging around a dance schematic—that captures and extends the dancers’ performance with lyrical intensity and vividness.
|
 |
FORREST GANDER, Translation: Fungus Skull Eye Wing: Selected Poems of Alfonso D'Aquino (Copper Canyon)
Fungus Skull Eye Wing is a book of shifting subjectivity and liquid perspective, of surrealist tradition and Butoh-like gestures. The text flirts with the margins of the "rational," perception, and the subjective mind. The speaker morphs into what he observes; speech comes alive while a plant becomes speech. Impeccably translated from Spanish by award-winning poet Forrest Gander in a bilingual edition.
|
 |
FORREST GANDER, Translation: Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon)
A blockbuster bilingual anthology of fifteen major Latin American poets, most in new translations, assembled and introduced by the great Chilean poet Raúl Zurita.
|
 |
CRISTINA GARCIA, Fiction: King of Cuba (Scribner)
Told with wry wit and keen insight, this entertaining and richly satisfying story about a fictionalized Fidel Castro and an octogenarian Cuban exile obsessed with seeking revenge against the dictator. El Comandante, an aging Castro-like dictator shambles about his mansion in Havana, visits a dying friend, tortures hunger strikers in one of his prisons, and grapples with the stale end of his life that is as devoid of grandeur as his nearly sixty-year-old revolution. Across the waters in Florida, Goyo Herrera, a Miami exile in his eighties, plots revenge against his longtime enemy—the very same El Comandante—whom he blames for stealing his beloved, ruining his homeland, and taking his father’s life. Shifting between the two men with great resonance and humor, and peppered with the rabble of other Cuban voices that create a patchwork of history’s unofficial stories, García’s novel plumbs the passions and realities of these two Cubas—on the island, and off.
|
 |
NATALIE GOLDBERG, The True Secret of Writing (Simon&Schuster)
Sit. Walk. Write. These are the barest bones of Natalie Goldberg’s revolutionary writing and life practice, which she presents here in book form for the first time. The True Secret is for everyone, like eating and sleeping. It allows you to discover something real about your life, to mine the rich awareness in your mind, and to ground and empower yourself. Goldberg guides you through your own personal or group retreat, illuminating the steps of sitting in silent open mind, walking anchored to the earth, and writing without criticism. The capstone to forty years of teaching, The True Secret of Writing is Goldberg’s Zen boot camp, her legacy teaching. Stories of Natalie’s own search for truth and clarity and her students’ breakthroughs and insights give moving testament to how brilliantly her unique, tough-love method works. Beautiful homages to the work of other great teachers and observers of mind, life, and love provide further secrets and inspiration to which readers will return again and again. In her inimitable way, Goldberg will inspire you to pick up the pen, get writing, and keep going. The True Secret of Writing will help you with your writing—and your life.
|
 |
JOY HARJO, Memoir: Crazy Brave (ppb, W.W. Norton)
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.
|
 |
TOM HEALY, Poetry: Animal Spirits (Monk Books)
Tom Healy’s Animal Spirits follows his much-praised poetry debut, What the Right Hand Knows. The book is a collaboration with celebrated artist Duke Riley. Pairing Healy’s intense, diamond-hard poems with Riley’s drawings of animals in the throes of ecstasy, affliction and bestiality, Animal Spirits brings the world of raptorial desire out into the open, blurring, even bruising, the lines that divide us from animal. The poems in this new book range from recollections of life on a farm to the writings of a dying grandmother to the heights of Everest, tracking Healy’s (read our) experience of the precarious, the provisional, and the immaterial terror that daily couples with our thrill and wonder at life on earth. As Richard Howard said of Healy’s earlier collection, there is a “certain sorcery” to Healy’s work that makes it “a pleasure at once sumptuous and cost-effective, precise and loving.” In the tight, but generous economy of these poems, Healy works his eloquent sorcery on the crude but complicated facts of human desire. Animal Spirits conjures a complicated world of emotion in which we are stung by pain even as we are stunned into joy.
|
 |
BOB HICOK, Poetry: Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon)
Gritty, complicated, and earnest, Elegy Owed breaks—then salvages—the rules for mourning. While poet Bob Hicok remembers the departed as ephemera or skin cells, fog is invited to tea and ex-girlfriends are resurrected via the occult magic of hard-drive memory. Hicok’s language is so humid with expectation and fearlessness that his poems create a clandestine manual to survival.
|
 |
BRENDA HILLMAN, Poetry: Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press)
The final volume in the poet’s extraordinary tetralogy on earth, air, water, and fire
Fire— its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms—is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman’s masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes—Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water—have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life.
|
 |
LINDA HOGAN, Poetry: The Remedies (Chickasaw Press)
Coming Soon!
|
 |
|
PAM HOUSTON, Fiction: Contents May Have Shifted (ppb, Norton)
Pam Houston’s latest takes us from one breathtaking precipice to the next as we unravel the story of Pam (a character not unlike the author), a fearless traveler aiming to leave her metaphorical baggage behind as she seeks a comfort zone in the air. With the help of a loyal cast of friends, body workers, and a new partner who inspires her to appreciate home, she finally finds something like ground under her feet.
|
 |
|
PAM HOUSTON Fiction: Waltzing the Cat (reissue, Norton)
In eleven linked fictions featuring a peripatetic photographer named Lucy O'Rourke, Houston serves up once more her charismatic blend of relationships and adventure. This is the story of one woman's struggle for balance in a world that keeps pitching and rolling under her feet. Dislocated geographically and spiritually, Lucy is prone to the wrong decisions at all the critical times; what's more, natural disasters just seem to find her: an accident on a rafting trip in Cataract Canyon, a grand cayman attack in the Amazon, a hurricane in the Gulf Stream-not to mention a few natural disasters in the form of men. A surprise encounter with Carlos Castenada convinces her that she isn't living the right life, and his cryptic message sends her back to her beloved Rocky Mountains. There, on a ranch, she takes comfort in animals, the jagged landscape of Colorado, and the sage advice of women friends; she even gives a man a try.
|
 |
|
PAM HOUSTON Nonfiction: A Little More About Me (reissue, Norton)
Renowned author Pam Houston treats us to a celebration of real-life adventures in this rich collection of essays. Ranging over five years and five continents, A Little More About Me introduces us to a woman—adventure-seeking, curious, and awestruck—whose experiences resonate with our own navigation through life’s many pleasures and challenges.
|
 |
|
GISH JEN Nonfiction: Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self (Harvard U Press)
For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders’ Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West....The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.
|
 |
|
LI-YOUNG LEE Nonfiction: The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (reissue, BOA Editions)
Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee’s memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance received a 1995 American Book Award. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister. This reissued edition contains a new Foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey.
|
 |
PHILLIP LOPATE Nonfiction: Portrait Inside My Head (Simon & Schuster)
From the distinguished essayist and undisputed master of the form, a lively, tender, and provocative new collection celebrating the life of the mind, from challenges of a Brooklyn childhood to the pleasures of baseball, movies, sex, books, friendship, and more. In this stunning compilation of personal essays, celebrated author, film critic, poet, and acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate weaves together the most colorful threads of a life well lived, inviting readers on an invigorating and thoughtful journey through memory, culture, parenthood, the trials of marriage both young and old, and an extraordinary look at New York’s storied past and present. Letting his mind wander skillfully across the page, Lopate offers a stirring meditation on everything from sex and politics to baseball and aging. Portrait Inside My Head is a charming and spirited new collection for readers to treasure.
|
 |
PHILLIP LOPATE Nonfiction: To Show and Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Simon & Schuster)
A long-awaited new book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate. In To Show and to Tell, he provides the nuts and bolts, offering a refreshing new master class on the craft of the personal narrative, including the personal essay and memoir. In his flawless, appealing conversational prose, Lopate gives expert guidance on navigating the many issues facing writers today, including how to turn oneself into a character, how to write about friends and loved ones, and how to successfully end an essay, all the while elaborating on the evolving place of creative nonfiction in the literary world. Lopate brings vividly into focus the true lifeblood of writing: exploration of one’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and the art of thinking, engagingly, on the page. With his guidance, writers in every field and at every stage of their careers are certain to learn a thing or two.
|
|
|
PAUL MULDOON Poetry: The Word on the Street (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
In his new book of rock lyrics, Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of the term “lyric”—a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. These words are written for music most assuredly, with half an ear to Yeats’s ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole Porter—and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love, lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel, elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches, Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and Jim and Cole). The Word on the Street is a lively addition to this Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s masterful body of work.
|
|
|
GREGORY ORR Poetry: River Inside the River (Norton)
Three gorgeous poetic sequences that combine the intensity of lyric with the thematic scope and range of narrative and myth. In the first sequence, “Eden and After,” Orr retells the story of Adam and Eve. “The City of Poetry” explores a visionary metropolis where “every poem is a house, and every house is a poem.” “River Inside the River” focuses on redemption through the mysterious power of language to resurrect the beloved and recover what is lost. River inside the river. World within the world. / All we have is words /To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures.
|
 |
|
BENJAMIN PERCY Fiction: Red Moon (Grand Central/Hachette)
Acclaimed, award-winning author Benjamin Percy gives us an epic and terrifying thriller set in the American West. They live among us. They are our neighbors, our mothers, our lovers. They change. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is. Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off it, the only passenger left alive, a hero. Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but he is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy. So far, the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs. But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge...and the battle for humanity will begin.
|
 |
|
GEORGE SAUNDERS Fiction: Tenth of December (Random House)
One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet. The unforgettable characters that populate these pages are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation. Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human. Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”
|
 |
|
DAVID SHIELDS Nonfiction: How Literature Saved My Life (Random House)
In his most wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, and painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature. Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal's Pensées to Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Renata Adler's Speedboat to Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants "literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this–which is what makes it essential." A captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing.
|
 |
CHARLES SIMIC, Poetry: New and Selected Poems {1962-2012} (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
For over fifty years, Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant and innovative poetic imagery, his sardonic wit, and a voice all his own. He has been awarded nearly every major literary prize for his poetry, including a Pulitzer and a MacArthur grant, in addition to serving as the poet laureate of the United States in 2007 and 2008. In this new volume, he distills his life’s work, combining for the first time the best of his early poems with his later works—including nearly three dozen revisions—along with seventeen new, never-before-published poems. Simic’s body of work draws inspiration from a range of topics, from the inscrutability of ordinary life to American blues, from folktales to marriage and war. Consistently exciting and unexpected, the nearly four hundred poems in this volume represent the best of one of America’s most distinguished and original poets.
|
 |
FORTHCOMING IN 2014
AMY BLOOM, Novel: Lucky Us (Random House)
PETER COLE, Poetry: The Invention of Influence (New Directions)
TED KOOSER, Poetry: Splitting An Order (Copper Canyon)
TED KOOSER, Poetry: The Wheeling Year (University of Nebraska)
BEN MARCUS, Fiction: Leaving the Sea (Knopf)
ROBIN ROBERTSON, Poetry: Sailing the Forest (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
|
|
|
