UI titles make New York Times 'Notable Books' list

A recent New York Times Book Review has recommended many books by authors connected to the UI as alumni or as members of the faculty.

The publication's list of "Notable Books of the Year 1997" also includes a volume published by the UI Press, Wet Places at Noon by Lee K. Abbott, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, administered by the UI Writers' Workshop.

The "Editors' Choice" list is headed by the novel American Pastoral, by former Writers' Workshop faculty member Philip Roth. Workshop faculty member and alumna Jorie Graham, whose Dream of the Unified Field won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, is represented on the "Notable Books" list with The Errancy: Poems.

The list of "Notable Books of the Year 1997" includes numerous other titles by Writers' Workshop graduates: Tess Gallagher's At the White Owl Woman Saloon, Denis Johnson's Already Dead: A California Gothic, Robert Coover's Briar Rose, Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighborhood, Chris Offutt's The Good Brother, Bharati Mukherjee's Leave It to Me, Allan Gurganus' Plays Well With Others, Steve Lattimore's Circumnavigation, Kristin Bakis' Lives of the Monster Dogs, James Hynes' Publish and Perish, Michelle Huneven's Round Rock, and Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House. Of those alumni writers, Johnson, Coover, and Mukherjee also have returned as guest faculty members in the workshop.

Other former workshop faculty represented on the "Notable Books" list are Deborah Eisenberg for All Around Atlantis, Anthony Burgess for Byrne, Frederick Busch for Girls, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass for Sun Under Wood: New Poems, Kurt Vonnegut for Timequake, Amy Hempel for Tumble Home, James Salter for Burning Days: Recollection, Francine Prose for Guided Tour of Hell, and Angela Carter for Burning Your Boats. Honor Moore, who taught last year in the English department's literary nonfiction program, made the list with The White Blackbird.

One former Writers' Workshop faculty member is even the subject of one of the books on the list, Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by Joseph Blotner.

The New York Times Book Review's "Noteworthy Collection" of paperbacks includes Tabloid Dreams by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, a graduate of the Department of Theatre Arts; and Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea by Writers' Workshop graduate Richard Bausch.

by Winston Barclay