About the Author

Fanny Howe's previous book of poetry, Second Childhood, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her fiction was recently honored as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. She lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

"This haunting and highbrow collection of poem, essay, and folktale meditates on youth, doomed or redeemed."--O, The Oprah Magazine"What I have always admired about Howe's work is its furious resistance against traditional form and how, like every great artist, she brings herself to an indelible pattern of literary thinking and feeling that most resembles her entire being. It's not just intellectually rigorous and passionate sentence making I'm talking about here (and, of course, it is all of that, too), but a unrelenting belief in the power of being a voice in the wilderness--a voice that takes energy and gives it to subjects like poverty and the disenfranchisement in the world, who gets to speak and who doesn't, spiritual adventurism, and an allegiance to fairy tales. She is, I think, an American mystic."--The Brooklyn Rail "[Fanny Howe's] experimental tales, mixing poetry and prose, offer little miracles of meaning growing from the darkest detritus of our planet. If there are epiphanies here, they are matches struck in the dark, wonders shining through wounds, intimacies of the banal."--Richard Kearney, Los Angeles Review of Books"[The Needle's Eye] possesses a liquid quality: fluid and elemental, substantial but not strictly or permanently shaped, like a river, maybe, or better yet like mercury. . . . The pleasures of this book are, like many of their subjects, mystical and itinerant, ricocheting and nonlinear."--Kathleen Rooney, Los Angeles Review of Books "[Howe] seamlessly braid[s] lyric and essayistic modes. . . . Moving from literary invocation. . . to lush, filmic description. . . Howe attempts--and often brilliantly, obliquely manages--to capture those qualities of youth that age inevitably dulls. . . . Her encompassing knowledge. . . and empathic vision will make readers believe her pronouncement: 'History is the top god of the secular world.'"--Publishers Weekly "An allusive and elusive collection of meditations on being and becoming, rites of passage, boys and the men they become. . . . A slim volume that roams across continents, genres, and centuries to convey that which is so difficult to express."--Kirkus Reviews "Howe is a prolific and renowned poet and novelist. . . . [The Needle's Eye] is an unclassifiable amalgam of essay, aphorism, quotation, narrative, and verse. . . . [A] strange, provoking book."--Booklist "The Needle's Eye, this little miracle, is a memoir of association. In it the young aren't so much young as molten; then Howe's own very young soul begins to unfurl itself into the collective unfinished time of youth when we are all traveler: part saint, part lover, part animal and 'terrorist.' As a writer she offers nothing less than a handful of the seeds of everything we will ever become."--Eileen Myles