Years ago, Archibald Morgan made a deal with the devil: he helped Hermann Goering hide his memoirs and twenty-five million dollars in gold. Today that deal has come back to haunt both him and Flora, the Romany woman who helped him do it... Read More
I thought I was in a prison, but the prison was just myself. We are all caught in ourselves. —Camus, from The Stranger The unconscious mind every so often hands a writer an intact narrative, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Robert... Read More
This young adult title is an engaging story about Miriam Bloom and her family, who set out from their difficult life in czarist Russia to travel across the ocean to America to join their father. Samuel Bloom has already made his way to... Read More
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history,” wrote Plato. This collection goes to the heart of vital human truth, exposes the raw ventricles there, and sends that heart pounding the reader into restorative action. This volume... Read More
For this author, the poet’s vocation is brutal, as knuckle-bloodying as any street fight. Consequently, the poems of his latest work are often chock-full of bravado, but in the end, the speaker admits his powerlessness: Why can’t the... Read More
Any poem whose significance resides only in its “meaning” will suffer from a widely unrecognized, and even less widely acknowledged, truth. The same facts, both emotional and experiential, might have been shared in an infinite number... Read More
This chilling tale of girls, not growing up, but merely existing in Los Angeles and its environs, is not your mother’s coming-of-age tale. Caught between bulimia, cocaine, and heroin, the girls traverse the dangerous territory of... Read More
Of the many risks that poets may choose, this one opts—unusually—for quietness. These poems speak in an understated, direct voice, with few verbal flourishes or tricks with language. “Gray,” for example, begins with the prosaic... Read More