Also Noted

As part of its celebration of National Poetry Month, Open Book will host The Face of Poetry, an exhibit of Margaretta Mitchell’s photographs of celebrated practitioners of the art, not one of which is recognizable to the average American (March 7–April 30) … One such luminary, Edward Hirsch—an excellent poet and a truly great writer about poetry—has a new collection just in time for NPM: Special Orders (available March 11) … Go ahead and try to name five living American short story writers better than Tobias Wolff. His Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (available March 25) is long overdue … I suppose we should hear this woman out before we commence our howling. At the moment all we can say about Mikita Brottman’s The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (available February 28) is that the early press suggests irresistible provocation, and a bit of Trojan Horse subversion … There was a time—believe it or not, children—when you couldn’t consider yourself a serious reader if you hadn’t at least dipped into the work of Leslie Fiedler. We spent a couple hours browsing through The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays (available March 28) and were pleased to discover that the old fellow really was a sharp and entertaining critic.