Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter has written five collections of poems, including her most recent, titled Open Shutters (Knopf, $23). She is also a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (Faber & Faber, $12). The most ingenious and perfectly made and moving of all of his plays. Why hasn’t he won the Nobel Prize yet? Having seen this in London, in New York, in amateur local theaters, having read it again and again, I keep unearthing new depths, but have never stopped laughing.

Foe by J.M. Coetzee (Penguin, $12). If Stoppard is “L’Allegro” for our time, Coetzee is “Il Penseroso.” (Another vote for the Nobel.) One can’t read this dark, troubling rewrite of Robinson Crusoe without a stubborn delight in its reflections on the art of writing itself.

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David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (Penguin, $8). If I were today’s Robinson Crusoe and could have only one novel with me, this would be it. What novel is funnier or more heartbreaking? Has any portrayed both childhood and the putting away of childish things with greater mastery?

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Penguin, $6). Another funny-sad, essentially fatherless boy at large in the world—who can neither wholly recognize his cruelties to his slave companion, Jim, nor forgive himself for his kindnesses—Huck is a character of bottomless and peculiarly American complexity.

Collected Poems by W.H. Auden (Vintage, $24). Joining the unwinnable debate on which period is the great Auden’s greatest, I’ll focus on 1939 alone. To me, the world would be a far less beautiful place without “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” “Law Like Love,” and “The Unknown Citizen.”

The Poems of Emily Dickinson