Last week, I posted about some of our Fall/Winter titles. Today, I’m going to offer a preview of a few more. 

In Rooms of Memory, by Hilary Masters: A collection of beautiful and carefully crafted essays by a man who has lived a very full life, connected to a lot of other very full lives. Masters is the son of the poet Edgar Lee Masters. He was close friends with writer and photographer (and Nebraska native) Wright Morris. In this collection, he steps back and forth through time – in one essay, he’s a college student and budding writer living in New York City and dreaming of escaping to Cuba with a woman he’s just met. In another essay, he’s a boy in Kansas City, living with his grandparents as his parents live the glamorous life in New York. In another, he’s past middle age, trying to see the world as his friend, photographer, novelist and essayist Wright Morris, did. His writing inspires the reader to see the world through a different lens, too.

Taste of Cherry, by Kara Candito: A collection of poems by a first-time author still in her 20s, who already has made a name for herself. Candito’s work has been published in journals including Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Best New Poets 2007, and the Florida Review, and she’s also a scholarship winner to the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. In this collection, she covers topics both mundane and taboo – lust, love, physical pain, emotional pain, exclusion, and pornography, to name a few – in haunting, well-turned verse. Her poems have a strong sense of place, as well, and take readers to New York, Miami and Egypt and elsewhere.

Swords from the Desert and Swords from the West, by Harold Lamb: These two volumes contain various short stories of Harold Lamb, a famous pulp fiction writer, and technical adviser to Cecil B. DeMille. They tell the fantastical tales of heroic crusaders, cunning maidens, scheming nobles and other memorable characters, set in the 16th Century and thereabouts against the mysterious backdrop of dunes and sand. His stories have appeared before in the pulp magazines of his day, but this is the first time these particular stories have been collected together. 

Stay tuned for more preview posts in upcoming weeks and months…