Reviews

Quiver by Luke Johnson (Whale Road Review, 2023.)

We the Jury by Wayne Miller, American Wake by Kerrin McCadden, Visiting Hours by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum (Parnassus Musing, 2021.)

The Milk Hours by John James, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being by Jeff Hardin (Parnassus Musing, 2019.)

Staff Picks

As a bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee from 2018 to 2022, part of my job was to write monthly recommendations for newly published books that I particularly enjoyed! Below is a smattering of my selections over those four years.

2 a.m. in little america - ken kalfus

In a near-future when civil catastrophe has rendered millions of Americans refugees, one such migrant, repairman Ron Patterson, tries to make a meaningful life in foreign enclaves. By reversing the nationalities in the headlines, Kalfus crafts a compact story that examines desire, identity, extremism, American culture and dreams. Stylish and razor-sharp insightful, this is an oh-so-timely novel for our generation.

the heart of american poetry - edward hirsch

By presenting 40 poems from nearly 400 years of poetry, this panoramic and diverse volume delves into the themes, styles, and influences within our vast poetic heritage. A personal and national odyssey of “encounters and realizations,” Hirsch follows each poem with an insightful essay analyzing both it and the poet as he eloquently invites us to join the ongoing discussion of what the American canon is and can be.

chilean poet - alejandro zambra

As funny as it is perceptive, Zambra’s latest follows Gonzalo, an aspiring poet, and Vicente, his stepson who may have more poetic talent than him. With utterly fantastic sentences, he combs the quagmires of romance; the bonds between fathers and sons, friends and lovers; the inexplicable quest to create lasting art. As a poet who has lived in Chile, this book has everything for me: humor, insight, life.

white bull - elizabeth hughey

Hughey’s collection won a prize I also submitted to, and now I know why I lost: because these pages are incredible. Every word in them was uttered or written by the infamous, racist “Bull” Connor of Birmingham, Alabama. By subverting and repurposing language, unexpected images bloom and beauty is built from the wreckage. As I was reading I kept thinking: How the heck did she do this?!

the pastor - hanne ørstavik

This quiet, lyrical translation follows the new pastor of a windswept town on the northern edge of Norway as she grapples with the suicide of a local teenage girl and the history of the indigenous Sami people who were violently converted to Christianity. Reflective and interior, it gets at the heart of how hard it can be to grasp the meaning of grief, romance, community, one’s very self.

once there were wolves - charlotte mcconaghy

As Inti leads a team to reintroduce wolves into the Scottish Highlands, the locals grumble, and she begins falling in love with one man when another winds up dead. Flashbacks reveal the unshatterable bond between her and her twin sister Aggie, while a twisty plot and visceral descriptions of wilderness articulate the rawness within landscapes and people, our human capacities for both violence and tenderness.

lost in summerland - barrett swanson

As a fan of insightful, personal yet journalistic essays, I appreciate the intelligence, patience, and humor on these pages. Ranging from the dusky Midwest to Florida’s octogenarian coast, he explores masculinity, ecological and political reality, spiritualism, and how to connect with others when we’ve moved past grand, collective narratives. Fans of Ben Ehrenreich and David Foster Wallace will find much to admire here.

the prophets - robert Jones, jr.

Centered around the blossoming love between Samuel and Isaiah, two slaves on a Mississippi plantation called Empty, this tour-de-force debut unfurls a narrative of tremendous range in prose of startling clarity. A magical realism element is at play—the ancestors are searingly near—as a wealth of characters’ internal lives are explored. This is a wholly original reimagining of suffering and salvation, humanity and defiance, sacrifice and love.  

jack - marilynne robinson

Marilynne Robinson may be my favorite living writer. There, I said it. Jack Boughton is many things—disheveled, blundering, thieving, wayward son of Gilead’s Presbyterian reverend—but he’s also falling in love with Della Miles, the bright, assured daughter of a Baptist minister. Set in post-WWII St. Louis, and told in generous, luminous prose, their interracial relationship explores the crevices in America’s heartland and the many facets of our motives and souls.

three rings - daniel mendelsohn

This slim blend of literary criticism and memoir is told in concentric narrative circles, a technique made famous by Homer’s Odyssey. Probing the lives and writings of François Fénelon, Erich Auerbach, W. G. Sebald, among others, he explores the thoughts of exiles and wanderers, dissects digressions and connections. I came to realize rings can symbolize so much: voids, embraces, edges, fate, closures, openings. 

migrations - charlotte mcconaghy

Many animals are extinct, but Franny Stone is determined to follow the last Arctic terns as they migrate south. Aboard the fishing vessel Saghani, her fraught love with Niall and deep-buried secrets emerge, endangering the motley crew. Wild, fragile Franny can’t escape what haunts her, even by going to the farthest reaches of the coldest seas. Daring in scope and vividly detailed, this debut is atmospheric, resolute, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful.

the museum of whales you will never see - A. Kendra greene

Did you know Iceland has museums about the phallological, sorcery, herring, and sea monsters? Well now you do! As Greene explores the country’s most peculiar museums, her observations contain the best aspects of travel writing: curiosity, whimsy, fascination, wit. She befriends curators, muses on the meaning of displaying objects, ponders why we tell the stories we do. It’ll make you want to visit Iceland, and open your eyes to the marvels all around.

apeirogon - Colum mccann

Highly experimental and deeply humanizing, Apeirogon fictionalizes the true stories of two fathers — one Israeli and one Palestinian — who have each lost a daughter to the conflict. The text spans a vast universe of countries, history, science, religion, geopolitics, ornithology, and more, creating artful and subtle connections among the vignettes. Out of the complexity, the power of grief and friendship emerges.

Make it scream, make it burn - Leslie Jamison

These essays blend journalism and memoir, topics running the gamut from Blue 52 (the “loneliest whale in the world”) to what Las Vegas’s architecture has to teach about constructing a marriage. Jamison’s personal life is always at the surface as she explores the nuance of desire and memory, longing and loss, connection and separation, the distances between us and the bridges we build to reach each other.

Say Say Say - Lila Savage

This perceptive debut follows Ella, a young caregiver, Bryn, a client, and Jill, his brain-damaged wife. Sparse on action and dialogue, it gets subtle power from Ella’s ponderings on Bryn’s tender care for his suffering wife, and her bond with her girlfriend. Intimate and lyrical, it explores creativity, aging, spirituality, and the complex nature of love: how relationships—professional, romantic, platonic—intersect and bloom in new ways.

salka valka - halldór laxness

Set in the tiny frigid town of Oseyri, Laxness charts the harrowing, hardscrabble coming of age of headstrong Salvör. Oscillating between the Salvation Army and fisherman’s union, socialism and capitalism, loss and longing, and populated with a sprawling net of characters and dialogue, this 600+ page novel chronicles the tale of a resilient, self-determined woman with the force of philosophy and poetry.

nobody’s magic - destiny o. birdsong

In this sexy, gritty, unapologetic debut novel, Birdsong embodies three black women from Shreveport, Louisiana who each have albinism. Their unique struggles, defining decisions, and hard-earned self-actualization kept me glued to the pages. The region is vividly portrayed, the dialogue so startlingly real I thought the characters were sitting right next to me. Read it now; it’ll be talked about all year.

manywhere - morgan thomas

These compact, descriptive short stories are deftly ambitious with voice and form as they illuminate the inner lives of queer characters in the south, from the Gulf Coast to Arlington to Louisiana and beyond. Dazzling, structurally confident, and unafraid to takes risks, the most impressive stories in the batch tie ingeniously into the lives of queer people from the past.

cloud cuckoo land - anthony doerr

Told from the perspectives of Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance in settings as varied as the 1453 siege of Constantinople, a public library in present-day Idaho, and a futuristic interstellar ship called the Argos—all ingeniously twined together by an invented comedic text attributed to Diogenes about a shepherd who’s been turned into a donkey—this is a big-hearted and vivid tale about the interconnectedness of people, nature, and stories, even across vast distances of time and space.

ghost forest - pik-shuen fung

Tender and supple, this sparse novel illuminates the complicated bonds of a family who emigrates from Hong Kong to Vancouver while the father stays behind to work, eventually falling ill. These micro-chapters of memory use white space brilliantly, breathing life into the unspoken ways relatives love and grieve when there are not enough words, not enough time.  

thirst - amélie nothomb

This translation of a super-slim French novella is told in the voice of a first-person, corporeal Jesus, opening with people complaining how they’ve been worse off since he worked miracles for them. The prose is irreverent and comedic, while also humanizing and philosophical. In fewer than one hundred pithy and wise pages, Nothomb meditates unforgettably on desire, loneliness, friendship, death, connection.

american wake - kerrin mccadden

How many other poets make metaphors as multifaceted, as capacious? Taking its apt title from the Irish concept of a vigil “for the living, the leaving”—those setting off for better fortunes in America—McCadden, in American Wake, weaves delicate familial webs, unearths ancestral stories, searches for home, and ruminates stunningly on her relationship with and struggles of her beloved drug-addled brother.

The bible with and without jesus - Amy-jill levine & Marc zvi brettler

Scholarly and insightful, these esteemed professors break down how Jews and Christians can look at the same texts and come to wildly different conclusions. It’s often a matter of linguistic translation, theological emphasis, traditional interpretation. By showing how “polemic can be turned to possibility,” they’ve penned a bold thesis for understanding and empathy between Jews and Christians, as well as those of any faith and culture.

ledger - jane hirshfield

Hirshfield’s ninth collection is a stirring meditation on wonder, loss, memory, climate, war, connection, the sheer strangeness of being alive. Using uncomplicated language, yet startlingly original images and metaphors, the precision of her diction delicately connects each poem to the next. Spare and pulsing, they are deeply moving and profound, and taken together illuminate the importance of noticing, caring, pondering, acting, existing. 

world of wonders - aimee nezhukumatathil

Buoyant and mesmerizing, Nezhukumatathil weaves musings on flora and fauna with personal experiences in this effortless melding of nature writing and memoir. Her observations of axolotls, ribbon eels, cassowaries, narwhals, dragon fruit, and so on, are nuanced by insights into her family, herself, her fellow human creatures. A taut profusion, this joyous book begs the reader to slow down and savor its language the way one should the ripest cara cara orange.

desert notebooks - ben ehrenreich

Intelligent and wide-ranging, this book is brimming with mythologies, climate science, the musings of anthropologists and philosophers, all woven together with Ehrenreich’s personal experiences in the American Southwest. A paean to the desert, as well as a spirited exploration of time, writing, culture, memory, and progress, he ponders how others have seen this singular world, and how we should live within our present political and geological moment.

one long river of song - brian doyle

These days, we could all use a reorientation toward wonder. This posthumous essay collection gleans revelation from tiny moments of beauty, childhood memories, human courage, and the glory within the everyday. Filled with kestrels and otters, brothers and fathers, hummingbirds and hearts—plus one huge sturgeon—his prose shines with humor, compassion, hard-won truths. 

The Galleons - Rick Barot

In his latest collection, Barot tackles a dizzying expanse of history, focusing on the lingering effects of colonialism while revealing his family’s story as Filipino immigrants. His hopeful, “grudging faith in the particular” positions the significance of the individual within the globe he crisscrosses. Using uncomplicated language, he mounts a singular internal exploration and a sweeping outward voyage through these layered, lyrical poems.

night sky with exit wounds - Ocean Vuong

These confessional, lyrical, lean poems are full of yearning: grappling with a lost homeland, a complicated father figure, the desire for sexual union. Exploring the trauma of war, starkness of violence, and physicality of gay romance, they engage life’s full spectrum that runs from pain to ecstasy. His recent debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, confirms what we glimpse in this poetry collection: that this young writer’s name is one to remember.  

interior states - meghan o’gieblyn

In these thoughtful, conversational essays, a formerly religious Midwesterner explores the cultural and spiritual landscape around her. With equal parts irony and longing, she—true to the title—seeks out the complexities and paradoxes of “flyover country” and gets at the heart of things in our country and within herself.

the life and death of a minke whale in the amazon - fábio zuker

Close-up and empathetic, these essays jump from Venezuelan migrants living under a bridge, to the tension between Indigenous healing and Western medicine, to the fight to save an enormous whale washed up deep in the Amazon rainforest. Zuker’s storytelling and reporting ranges through colonization, deforestation, politics, and ultimately the relationships of people to the land and communities around them.

the hurting kind - Ada Limón

Remarkably attentive to the wounds and wonders of the world around her, Limón’s feral and tender new collection illumines far-off cities and backyard gardens, divorce and longing, foals and trillium, ancestors and lovers. Through distilled language, careful line breaks, evocative scenes, she questions cliché and nostalgia, and presses powerfully toward desire. This is her best work yet.

pure colour - sheila heti

This weird and wonderful novel is told by Mira as she grieves for her father and falls in love with her friend, Annie. Set in a “first draft” of Creation, people are descended from birds, fish, bears, and Mira spends an extended period of time as a leaf on a tree. Elliptical as myth, it explores relational depths through ecological and theological lenses, scattering tiny truths within its wise vignettes along the way.

a different distance - marilyn hacker & karthika naïr

Written by two poets and friends living in Paris during the COVID-19 lockdown, each poem responds to the preceding one, enlarging the other’s ponderings and vision. These spare, cleaving stanzas land on images that bring interiorities to life, and while there is isolation, longing, disaster, loss, there also exists hope, memory, moments of undeniable beauty and connection.

philomath - devon walker-figueroa

Named for the northwest logging town of her childhood, sensual and sacred desires surge through these gritty, expressive poems. They are often long, meandering through memory and clinging to the clarity of strong details. From the secrets of ghost towns, mysteries of ancestry, to meditations on innocence and death, the words return to the bodies we find ourselves in, the places we are from and formed.

worldly things - michael kleber-diggs

Conversational and neighborly, with empathy and without pretension, he threads the everyday with the expansive. These poems are about many things: the ghost of his father; racism in our nation, his experience as a black son, husband, dad, citizen. Page after page, he shows how despite the misunderstandings and sufferings we all wade through, there exists connection, luminosity, joy.  

the everlasting - katy simpson smith

A book I loved in 2020 is out in paperback! Ambitious and strikingly original, the four lives that play out in four time periods of Rome subtly interlock, exploring the different ways desire shapes and haunts our human hearts. Also, a heartbroken and relatable Satan interjects his bracketed thoughts throughout the book, which is a tad weird but quite entertaining and thought-provoking.

the lowering days - gregory brown

When an obsolete paper mill is set on fire along the Penobscot River in northern Maine, the bonds and rifts between the Ames and Creel families are reignited. Wise, tender, and with a knack for pacing, this swirling debut explores the interrelation among nature, wonder, brotherly bonds, fathers, Native communities, violence, forgiveness, grief, the consequences of one’s actions, and love.

the fragile earth - David remnick & Henry finder (eds.)

Blending the in-depth research and good old-fashioned storytelling the New Yorker is known for, these essays discuss how a changing climate is altering the planet we love, and what we can do about such a dire shift. Exploring topics as varied as golden frogs in Panama, Inupiat whalers in a remote Alaskan village, megafires on the Great Plains, and Adélie penguin colonies in Antarctica, the collection is fascinating, terrifying, and ultimately galvanizing. 

against the loveless world - Susan Abulhawa

Told from an Israeli solitary confinement cell, Nahr recounts the struggles she faced in Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine as she searches for a place to belong. In a saga filled with family, friends, and enemies, her desperation and defiance shine through. The beauty of land and culture sits next to the pain of living as a refugee and second-class citizen. Harsh realities can’t hold strong-willed Nahr back as she embodies the human longing for love and peace.

when the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through - Joy harjo (ed.)

The first Norton anthology of solely Indigenous poetry, this is a vital and stirring addition to American letters. Arranged into five geographical regions, it features the work of 161 poets, representing 90 native nations and spanning four centuries. While expansive in subject matter, cultures, traditions, techniques, voices, styles, and forms, editor Joy Harjo admits this teeming compendium “is only a slivered opening into a vast literary field.”

things you would know if you grew up around here - Nancy Wayson dinan

During the Texas Hill Country’s calamitous Memorial Day floods of 2015, uncannily empathetic Boyd must traverse the torn landscape in search of Isaac, her closest friend. Drenched with magical realism, the world grows wild, time unspools, secrets emerge from the earth. In the wake of the storm, Boyd, Isaac, their families, and strangers will all be changed, but in what ways? This is a truly immersive and electric debut. 

The Mountains Sing - Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

This vivid, multigenerational, sweeping novel about the bonds of family, scars of war, and power of forgiveness pours from the pen of this acclaimed Vietnamese poet. Alternating between the time periods and points of view of Dieu Lan and her granddaughter, Huong, she brings to life the unique traditions and trials of Vietnam’s agonizing 20th century, and portrays the universality of human struggle and hope.

a long petal of the sea - isabel allende

Acclaimed author Isabel Allende has given us another stunning novel, spanning decades and continents as she follows Roser and Victor from the Spanish Civil War through Chile’s military dictatorship. Expertly paced and with fully-realized characters, I found myself learning so much while simply enjoying the story. Love, struggle, longing, exile, hope…it’s all here. Fans of beautifully crafted historical fiction will rejoice.

The universal christ - Richard rohr

By reframing what is meant by “Christ,” Franciscan priest Richard Rohr makes the case that the divine is in all things, that we’re all more loved and connected than we realize. Drawing from Buddhism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other theologians to flesh out his perspective, he depicts a mystical, inclusive vein of spirituality. While some may find him too New-Agey, he shakes up Christian dogma with refreshing insights.