A complex story of contradiction, disillusion and love, George's Daughter is a memoir/essay about a daughter's attempt to live in accordance with her own values, in spite of conflicts with her controlling father whom she nonetheless adores. Ultimately, her defiance of him--by refusing to end a romantic relationship of which he does not approve--leads to emotionally catastrophic consequences for them both. These themes will resonate with anyone whose family has come undone when a member refuses to adhere to conventional expectations, whether around gender, race, class, religion, politics or culture.

The story originates in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after World War II. During the author's childhood, Crown Heights was reeling from the traumas of displaced persons, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, and those who had lost entire families to the war. Decades later, the neighborhood was again traumatized by tensions, discriminations, and disruptions caused by opposing racial and religious politics that continue to this day.

George's Daughter illuminates how the decision to live one's life, as one must, may cause enormous psychic rupture: A person might lose, but ultimately find again, both their family and their sense of self in the process.

Known for his smart, lively baseball writing, his acclaimed biography of the rock music legend Chrissie Hynde, and his erudite literary essays, Adam Sobsey returns with a powerful, passionate, deeply personal memoir of reckoning with his Jewish identity.

In October of 2018, the day after a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven Jews, Adam Sobsey woke up with acute stomach pain. The next morning, he was in surgery to remove his appendix. A nonpracticing Jew, he made no connection between these two events. But six months later, when he arrives in Romania to visit the homeland of his great-grandparents, who had immigrated a century earlier - to Pittsburgh, where they helped found a synagogue-he is besieged by a mysterious illness that responds to no treatment and just as mysteriously vanishes the day he leaves the country, three weeks later.

Through the upheaval in his body and his encounters with the ravaged ruins of Jewish life in Romania-and flooded by memories of his own past-Sobsey is forced to confront his Jewish identity and roots. Once at home again, he bonds to his heritage by immersing himself in the power of words: a forgotten corner of the Hebrew Bible, the legendary travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Jewish writers and artists ranging from the seminal Romanian existentialist poet Benjamin Fondane, who perished at Auschwitz, to Bob Dylan himself. Finally, he goes to Pittsburgh, in search of last clues about his family origins.

It's 1973. Bice Rappa's mother is dead, her older brother has disappeared, and her controlling father barely lets her leave their house in Queens. As he reads books on horticulture and dissects the bodies of birds, she dreams of going to school-that is, until she finds out that the man who is raising her has made her poisonous.

For Bice, escaping home means befriending an orphaned daredevil, charming the donor coordinator at a Manhattan fertility clinic, and becoming the single mother of a baby named Mari. For her brother, it means living in a windowless room in an artist commune where he struggles with obsessive fears of climate crisis and death. Against the apocalyptic backdrop of Y2K, their father will want nothing more than to track down-and abduct-his only grandchild. When the Rappas' paths cross again, will Bice and her daughter be able to protect each other?

A contemporary gothic retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter, The Poison Girl follows three generations of girls and women through New York City as they navigate experiences of diaspora and neurodivergence, patriarchal architectures, and environmental violence.

This intimate and haunting collection is a love song, a soliloquy, a work of praise, a call to arms, an offering of abundance. There's an urgency to The Runner's Almanac: what's inside the poet must come out. These are poems of gusto, of movement-walking, jogging, striding, hopping-toward love, inevitably. Amirthanayagam is a poet of plurality who savors how a poem gets out of hand, bursts its banks, spills into the mind of the reader. I think of Amirthanayagam, that sharp and tender poetic voice of his, as a village elder, a guide, a truth-teller. But he's the elder that will hold your feet to the fire and not let you forget. More than ever, in The Runner's Almanac, one feels his purpose / even clearer, to dedicate what / remains of breath, love and work / to spread the word of poetry.

Caroline Hagood takes the reader on a wild ride, using surreal stories to process the recent death of her father. She mourns by making language work as a time machine to go back and let her father live again, bending space and time to make a place for him, if only in this book that is, above all, a séance. Death and Other Speculative Fictions is for anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one and searching everywhere for answers.

Flaco, the eagle-owl liberated from his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, captivated the city. He remained in Central Park for nine months living on his own, eventually also exploring nearby buildings and neighborhoods in Manhattan. In February 2024, one year after his escape, Flaco died after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side. Poet Leonard Schwartz and artist Heide Hatry explore the implications of the Eurasian eagle-owl's sojourn.

Following the breakup of his marriage and the loss of a child, Ty Rossberg books himself a suite at the wrong hotel. There he meets his dream girl, Ellory Allen, a parking lot heiress who's on the run. Together, Ellory and Ty will conquer the world. But when they meet a laid-back prophet in the Olympic mountains, their dream life takes a nightmarish turn.

Recommended if you like: true romance; exiles; tying the knot after 40; screwball comedy; novels you would like to read again; pools of light; digging the opener more than the headliner; oversized fashion magazines at the beach; Paloma Picasso; renouncing your influences; going for broke; tripping on the Fourth of July; the beauty of a sudden density of life.

The hard line of horizon draws the eye, always forward, writes Jory Mickelson as they guide us in this richly-drawn pastoral of the American West. Like Whitman, Mickelson celebrates the natural world in great detail both in its landscapes and in the people who inhabit them. All This Divide is a beautiful and sensual collection that takes as it purpose ...to make every image true, or at least true enough to last.

Ian Maloney's South Brooklyn Exterminating immediately takes its place among the plain-spoken, hilarious, and heartbreaking classics of American working-class fiction. It's a book about many things...Also, it's about rats. Lots and lots of rats. Jesus Mary and Joseph, all the rats.

In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South's oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide. After extensive travels, Brenner frees herself in the Bay Area to become more beatnik than debutante. Framed by historic events, this is the moving coming-of-age story of a generation.

Catherine Bresner's Can We Anything We See initiates a new mode of ekphrasis in the postinternet age. In this long poem, Bresner explores the ways in which current technologies, specifically artificial intelligence, outline the uncanny valley of speculative thought and shape a sense of personhood. In lines that sometimes act as captions or ciphers (or both), Bresner allows for the caesuras of breath and contemplation, in consideration of the digital landscape human beings currently find themselves in. Simultaneously present, prescient, and timeless, Can We Anything We See invites infinite readings.

It is an emotional history of Ukraine with a very well researched and vivid historical background that gives the reader the opportunity to understand not only the characters and their drama, but the entire drama of the country/countries in which they lived without leaving their village.

The Accident is a fragmentary, lyric thing. Not a story. Not a record. An account--provisional and subject to revision. It is a reckoning with the ways language and narrative fail to make sense of the recursive slippages of loss.

With a deft command of comic distance and abiding compassion for her characters, Lynn Levin in House Parties, her debut collection of short fiction, presents us with a broad range of characters who ardently, foolishly, and often with weird invention, relentlessly spar with their fates.

Three friends hike through Yosemite in search of an awe-inspiring waterfall that may or may not exist...a girl on a high-school science trip finds herself abandoned on an island inhabited by aggressive monkeys...a lonely young rabbinical student creates and animates a female form only to see her beloved creature acquire free will...overwhelmed by surveys, an office worker rebels à la Bartleby...a couple believes that a move to a friendly and sophisticated exurban neighborhood will set the stage for happy marriage.

Many of the characters in House Parties see themselves with a certain bemused humor and strive to stay self-possessed even as they struggle against the strange and undeserved things that happen to them. At other times, the characters-sometimes successfully, sometimes not-keep trying to escape the gravity of a plight they created or a problem they refuse to resolve. In observant and generous prose, Levin writes in tones that range from the wry, witty, and hilarious to the lyrical and deeply serious.

William Allen creates an imagistic world undergoing momentous changes in a series of poems based on titles of long-disappeared paintings from 19th-century New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister as well as in poems evoking smells, sights, sounds of mid-nineteenth century America along the Newtown Creek between Queens and Brooklyn.

Poems celebrate the Queensboro Bridge, echoing Hart Crane, Walt Whitman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminding us of our immigrant and revolutionary heritage. And inspired by Awkwafina and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, 21 Stations evokes lives and music and history along the stations of the New York City 7 train, the 167 languages spoken there, journeying east out of the city.

Maybe we're at an end, hearing a song fading out before a related but unexpected song begins. In retrospect, maybe a reckoning of some kind was inevitable all along. Eventually, when and if we must push forward without the resources we've relied on in the past, in that darkness, perhaps we'll all need imaginations trained on drawing lessons like the ones here.

James Berger takes up the question with a sly, ironic wit that interrogates the idea of poetics and subjects his own assumptions and biases to a ruthless and delightfully honest self-critique. Many poets will see their own agon reflected here. My project is to slog/ my mortality in the dried vein// of lyric, and to claim// at last my incapacity// as my own. Yet this is not a poetry of exhaustion, but of self-renewing vitality: Yeats' foul rag and bone shop or Manny Faber's termite art, restless, eating away at its own boundaries. Subversive and disarming, Berger charts his development as a poet with humor and panache. It makes for one hell of a ride.

Like Whitman's Song of Myself, Hughes' Sugar Factory is a laud for the land, a deep song of praise for the ecstasy in the ordinary. Riding the train, peeling fruit, contemplating streaks of color--here we find everyday encounters opening doorways to memory, both intimate and ancestral. The result is a quietly fierce collection of poems that spans coasts and continents as it boldly carries the voices of the living/and the dead.

Patricia Killelea

Joe Elliot's new book, An Everything, is a celebration of the ordinary and the daily. Joe's the New York poet, the teacher, father, entertaining, insulting and every so often tossing a student's hand grenade poem back out the window. I love the humor and the surprises-when the universe becomes Sister Mary Theresa. Or a bird song becomes greater than the sky. Or at night while hanging wet towels on the railing or changing a lightbulb, suddenly an awareness of the infinite and instantaneous passage of time. These poems are funny, deep and wise, and I was very glad to read them.