‘Night at the Fiestas’ by Kirstin Valdez Quade
At its best, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s new collection of stories, Night at the Fiestas, sidesteps cliché but keeps the grandeur of her setting by transposing it to her characters—people big as myth, opaque as Scripture
‘Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014’ by Marilyn Hacker
A Stranger’s Mirror demonstrates Hacker’s continued formal mastery; she effortlessly spins one sonnet into two, then three, then seven, leaving readers always breathless for more.
‘Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity’ by David M. Friedman
“The book’s central thesis is that our modern-day cult of celebrity, in the Kardashian sense of unaccomplished people famous for being famous, had its beginnings in Wilde’s American tour.”
‘Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father’ by Alysia Abbott
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (W.W. Norton & Company) by Alysia Abbott manages to pick up the nearly moribund genre of the AIDS memoir, give it a good dusting off, and then send it back out into the world with something like a fighting chance.
‘Harvard Square’ by André Aciman
[,,.] André Aciman’s greatest accomplishment with his latest novel: the crafting of a thoroughly inclusive love letter to those who have ever felt excluded.
