Susan Stinson Small Beer Press ($16) Based on the life of Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), Spider in a Tree is a novel firmly grounded in fact: the author has “infused the text” with material drawn from the writing of the preacher and his contemporaries. However, the story is not bogged down with historical detail […]

Anita Reynolds With Howard Miller Edited by George Hutchinson Harvard University Press ($29.95) Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds (1901-1980) was a multiracial expatriate with a Cocteauesque talent for being present at opportune historical moments and befriending people who would later become famous. This memoir begins in Reynolds’ hometown of Los Angeles (where she was a minor […]

Glenway Wescott Edited by Jerry Rosco University of Wisconsin Press ($26.95) Author Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) saw most of the major events of the twentieth century, and this collection of autobiographical stories and essays serves as “a truthful, chronological portrait” of the man and his time. The diverse topics range from stoic, stifled families in the […]

Tony Trigilio BlazeVOX Books ($16) This is the first book in a projected multi-volume poem about the eponymous gothic soap opera, which author Tony Trigilio watched as a young child. The show “nurtured and sustained” the poet’s inner life before he could speak, and the “primal sensations” associated with these pre-lingual experiences make them ripe […]