MER Bookshelf – March 2026
Date: March 19, 2026
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and […]
Date: March 19, 2026
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and […]
Date: March 17, 2026
Tucson storyteller Molly McCloy loves telling stories about hard things. She’s done it on stage and in print. Her memoir, “Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on […]
Date: March 17, 2026
Maurya Simon’s The Blue Bridge, her twelfth volume of poems, will appear in 2026 (Etruscan Press). Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers […]
Date: March 12, 2026
During Hurricane Irma in 2017, a 90-foot oak tree split and fell into the middle of Amy Pence’s cottage in the old fishing village of Pine Lake, Georgia. A beam […]
Date: March 11, 2026
It’s finally warming up here in Washington, DC, and earlier this month was the first instance I was able to comfortably sit on our roof and read. With a coffee […]
Date: March 3, 2026
April Ossmann discusses poetry collection, WE with Derate the Hate podcast.
Date: March 3, 2026
Yellow is a slow-bloom speculative novel and quietly cosmic. It’s a book about how long childhood wonders and wounds can linger, how the universe keeps whispering even when we stop […]
Date: March 3, 2026
Molly McCloy discusses her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES: THE SPITEFUL ORIGINS OF THE HAPPIEST DYKE ON EARTH with Hannah Harlee.
Date: March 3, 2026
It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence […]
Date: February 24, 2026
This satirical literary thriller has shades of Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. A 19-year-old NYU dropout returns home to Brentwood to laze about and enjoy popping prescription pills. But […]
Date: June 5, 2020
Reading poet Elizabeth Bradfield’s latest collection, Toward Antarctica: An Exploration, may not be as dramatic as actually visiting the continent, but it will likely be as close as many of us will get. Thanks […]
Date: June 4, 2020
Mia Heavener, now living in Anchorage, grew up fishing in Bristol Bay, where she absorbed stories her mother and other women told between tides and over tea. Her lovely debut […]
Date: June 4, 2020
Seagulls swoop and dive, crying in the salty air. The waves of Nushagak Bay crash on sandbars and rocky shores. Machines rattle the warehouses on the cannery side of the […]
Date: June 4, 2020
A champion of contemporary Latinx poetry, Francisco Aragón returns with his third collection, After Rubén (Red Hen Press). A scholar, translator, and the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, Aragón draws inspiration from the life […]
Date: June 4, 2020
In her moving debut collection, poet Didi Jackson creates a poetics of grief to cope with the suicide of her husband. Moon Jar is a testament to resilience. Split into three […]
Date: June 3, 2020
1942: Clair and Shep Durant, along with their mute four-year-old son, Ty, wait for evacuation to India before the imminent Japanese invasion of the remote Andaman Islands. Shep, a doctor, […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in 1936. They dive deep into their […]
Date: June 3, 2020
ON THE FRONT COVER of Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy there is a palm-lined cove under a twilight sky. Unspoiled by modernity, this looks like island escapism, with no indication this is a […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Channeling some past classics also skeptical of the colonial enterprise, Glorious Boy stands out from the crowded shelves of World War II literature by immersing the reader in one of the remoter […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing […]