A favorable review in the Irish Times and selection as an "Editor's Choice" by The New York Times Book Review are the latest plaudits for The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press), edited by Robert Faggen, the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature and director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. Faggen's book has received international acclaim since its release last month. Coverage includes Newsweek, The New Republic, The New York Times, the London Telegraph, Financial Times, and The Weekly Standard, as well as featured excerpts in Harper's and The Paris Review.
Newsweek turned an eye to Notebooks in its Feb. 5 issue, referring to Frost as "The Man with Two Brains," whose poems were "performances" both in public readings and on the printed page.
"With all the crossings out and [illegible]s preserved," says Newsweek, "we can see that the notion of having two brains wasn't just a gag" that Frost's own contradictory thoughts "show this least innocent of men taking himself by surprise."
Newsweek's review of The Notebooks follows Faggen's Jan. 28 interview with Jacki Lyden on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, aired locally on KCRW 89.9 and KPCC 89.3.
The New York Times Book Review praised Faggen's work, saying in its Feb. 4 issue: "Any Frost reader will benefit from Faggen's thoughtful introduction and be intrigued by the way in which concepts from these largely aphoristic journals animate the poems and vice versa."
Faggen also is the author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (University of Michigan) and has edited The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, the Selected Poems of Edward Arlington Robinson, the Early Poems of Robert Frost, and Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz.