Pbs: 73 books

When a writer dies too young, readers are always left with the question “What kind of writer would he have become if he had been granted a full career?” Matthew Phillips wrote these astonishingly good poems in his mid- twenties when he was studying Mideast history and politics and when he was...

For most of the 1970s and 80s, poet and painter Robert Sund spent part of each year his at small shack on the Skagit River estuary. There, he kept journals of his observations and reflections as well as encounters with friends and fellow artists from the nearby community of Fishtown. With freshness...

Fiction. Jewish Studies. Margot Brenner seems to have everything a 25-year-old could want: a medical degree, a pediatric internship at a prestigious New York hospital, an attentive boyfriend. So why does she abandon her boyfriend and internship for a position at a second-rate hospital in a small German...

Most of the lawyer poets represented in this anthology are practicing lawyers (and judges); a few abandoned the legal profession to take up teaching or literary work. Unlike most lawyer poets, who do not, in their poetry, explicitly lay claim to being lawyers and maintain a wall of separation between...

Poetry. "Sensuous, sensual, brave and insistent, Sanelli's work shows the enclosures we tend provide no refuge. Cruelty, violation, aging or sudden death aren't invaders; they've been under our feet all along: 'the world, suddenly, too over-exposed/ to see, too piercing to hear.' This gardener...

WHEN BLOCH, a popular London novelist, starts writing a fictionalized story featuring his unremarkable friend Oscar, the invented details from the story start to come true. Gradually, Oscar embarks on a surreal odyssey into fame, while Bloch descends into the dark places of his soul. Oscar falls in...

Susan is asleep. So begins this first novella by Gilbert Girion. SOUND OF A TRAIN follows Susan Walker, a woman on a reluctant journey toward what she senses is an impending loss, painfully aware of the isolation she sometimes feels in the midst of friends and family. In this haunting and often humorous...

Cultural Writing. THE ENDURING VISION OF NORMAN MAILER is Professor Barry H. Leeds' second book about one of America's most respected, most controversial, and most prolific authors. It looks at Mailer from where Leeds' first volume left off and takes him on through his most recent works. "Leeds'...

Tom Hall is one of those rare books which qualifies as a Young Adult novel as well as a challenging read for adults. In this coming-of-age work, twelve-year-old Tom Hall must accompany his sick father to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Arizona. The year is 1945, and Eddie, Tom's father, calls the magic...

Fiction. Mace Caslon walks into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and throws acid on Universal Woman, a forty-one million dollar Picasso. This provocative act throws him into the center of a media-crazed frenzy: Exploitive television personalities, enraged museum officials, terrified collectors, confused...

Fiction. Irving Warner has come up with a remarkable and wildly comicnovel about an obese man who escapes from a so-called weight-lossinstitution and is pursued by the police, the state patrol, and numerousbounty hunters. All these have been set after him by Wagner'sbillionaire mother, whom he refers...

Fiction. Translated from the Swedish by Laura Wideburg. Sudden murder and the resulting psychological tension are the hallmarks of Inger Frimansson's acclaimed thrillers. In ISLAND OF NAKED WOMEN, Tobias, an author of mystery novels, must return to the family farm after his father became incapacitated...

Fiction. Translated from the Swedish by Laura Wideburg. Once again, Inger Frimansson takes her readers into the dark hearts of our friends and neighbors. Her crime novels are unsettling in their deep examination of everyday human lives. Frimansson's characters are not evil, nor are they particularly...

Fiction. In his new religious thriller, Richard Gid Powers weaves Church intrigue, corporate crime, religious symbols, mystical theology, ancient history and legend into a high stakes struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church. This fast paced adventure sends Ann Carroll, heir to America's greatest...