Fiction: Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau. Terrific, lyrical novel set in Martinique and a tribute to the art of translation.

Short Stories: Brownsville, Oscar Casares; and I Sailed with Magellan, Stuart Dybeck. Oscar is relatively new, from far south Texas; Dybeck, from Chicago, is justly famous. Place figures prominently in both books.

Essays: The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry. Still relevant 35 years later, this book, too, is all about place. Though he rarely strays from his Kentucky farm in this book, Berry’s attitude, wherever he is, is to immerse oneself slowly, and, eventually, to emerge just as slowly, having soaked up the land’s story and disturbed as little of it as possible, leavng behind the same place for the next visitor or landowner. Think environmental stewardship treated as vagabonding on geologic time.

Poetry: After All, William Matthews. The last book of poems from one of my favorite poets. No writer, poet or journalist ever captured Charles Mingus like Matthews did.

Travel: Vagabonding. No joke.

Nonfiction: manuscript of Splendor in the Short Grass, a collection of the magazine work of Grover Lewis, UT Press 2005. No longer well-known, Grover did some of the best writing about music and, especially, movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Don’t take it from me, take it from Tim Cahill: “He (Grover) was the best of all of us.”

Cheers,
Casey