Stephanie Paulsell's Christmas list

To give

René Steinke’s third novel, Friendswood, explores the effects of an environmental disaster on several families in a small Texas town and the ways religion shapes their fears, hopes, and responses. This is a novel about what we owe one another as neighbors and as human beings, and it reveals the sacredness of human attempts to repair what has been broken.

Fanny Howe, our most mystical poet, ex­plores the ways childhood pulses through an entire life in Second Child­hood. Howe’s language, fragmented yet precise, creates “a place to surmise / blessedness.”