Some of Her Friends That Year
Maxine Chernoff fans will relish the fifteen new stories, and new readers will discover a wonderful assemblage of Chernoff's likeable and contemplative characters. With the precision of a poet and the astuteness of a sociologist, Chernoff continues to establish herself as a master of the short story genre with this excellent collection, which includes stories from Bop and Signs of Devotion.

Bird at My Window
Rosa Guy's powerful novel follows a
young and brilliant black man who wakes in a mental
hospital and is told he has assaulted his sister. Unable to
recall the circumstances that brought him to commit this
unthinkable act, he retraces his steps and reveals the
rich complexity of mid-twentieth-century Harlem and its
mothers, sons, and daughters whose aspirations prevail
and perish within both white and black America.

The Man Who Swam with Beavers
Inspired by Alaska Native legends and myths of her adopted state, Nancy Lord explores humankind’s innate need for contact with nature in the contemporary fables that make up The Man Who Swam with Beavers. The title refers to a Dena’ina Indian story about a man who lives with beavers, and realizes that all creatures have "their own lives, as complete and legitimate as any others."

Breakers
"Breakers brings together several of this influential poet’s major, longer poems, and presents new work. Paul Violi has written poems in numerous nonpoetic forms: poems in the shape of an index of a book, a TV schedule, and the mooring plan of boats in a yachting marina are examples. He is also very funny and very serious, often at the same time. . . . We know by now that the postmoderns, whoever they are, level high and low culture, and can start a sentence on Mount Olympus and end on Canal Street". -Martin Stannard