Spring Preview: A Few Books We're Excited For
Every season brings its share of books to look forward to, and this spring is no different. On this week's episode the host Gilbert Cruz and his colleague Joumana Khatib talk about a dozen or so titles that sound interesting in the months ahead.
Books discussed on this episode:
'Dream Count,' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
'Sunrise on the Reaping,' by Suzanne Collins
'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,' by Stephen Graham Jones
'Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools,' by Mary Annette Pember
'Great Big Beautiful Life,' by Emily Henry
'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' by Ian Leslie
'Yoko: A Biography,' by David Sheff
'Searches,' by Vauhini Vara
'Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America,' by Michael Luo
'Rabbit Moon,' by Jennifer Haigh
'Mark Twain,' by Ron Chernow
'Authority,' by Andrea Long Chu
'Spent,' by Alison Bechdel
'Fish Tales,' by Nettie Jones
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
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Los Angeles Times
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The week's bestselling books, June 8
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Boston Globe
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Alice Notley, poet celebrated for ‘restless reinvention,' dies at 79
Ms. Notley took traditional forms of poetry such as villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism. She also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes. In her 2020 collection, 'For the Ride,' one calligram took the form of a winged coyote. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn,' David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. Advertisement As Ms. Notley herself said in a 2010 essay, 'It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.' She wrote without restraint, saying that she never edited or revised her work. 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'I knew I had to, because I was going to become a weirdo.' She moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963. After graduating, she pursued a master's degree in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she forged a close relationship with poet Anselm Hollo, who taught there, and met Berrigan. They married in 1972 and lived nomadically, keeping afloat through Berrigan's teaching jobs. They briefly stayed with painter Larry Rivers in the garage of his home in Southampton, N.Y. In Bolinas, Calif., in Marin County, they resided in what she called a 'chicken house' that belonged to writers Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams. Ms. Notley's early work, in the 1970s and '80s, centered on new motherhood -- her sons, Anselm and Edmund, were born in 1972 and 1974 -- and her writing was colored by the intermingling voices of her and her sons. 'Mommy what's this fork doing?/What?/It's being Donald Duck,' she wrote in her 1981 poem 'January.' 'Notley wrote extensively about pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing at a time when the poetry world was often inhospitable to women,' Wallace wrote in The New Yorker, adding that 'her influence for a later generation of poets exploring these same subjects is hard to overstate.' Advertisement In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. In New York, she taught workshops to a generation of influential poets, including Eileen Myles, Bob Holman, and Patricia Spears Jones. Despite their prominence in the community, she and her husband struggled financially and lacked medical care; Berrigan's hepatitis went untreated. 'We had 20 dollars on the day Ted died,' Ms. Notley said. Throughout the 1980s, her poems grew longer and acquired more mythical tones. That trend continued in the 1990s, when she moved to Paris with poet Douglas Oliver, whom she married in 1988. They founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet. Oliver died in 2000. In addition to her sons, Ms. Notley leaves two sisters, Rebecca White and Margaret Notley, and two granddaughters. This article originally appeared in
Geek Girl Authority
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Just Emilia Archives
Categories Select Category Games GGA Columns Movies Stuff We Like The Daily Bugle TV & Streaming Geek Girl Authority reviews Jennifer Oko's third novel, Just Emilia, a speculative novel about a woman facing her past and future.
