Best of ""Prairie Schooner"": Personal Essays

Former Prairie Schooner managing editor Flaherty notes in her introduction that few of the 16 writers collected here are essayists foremost. Flaherty and Raz, the journal's editor, gather work from poets (Maxine Kumin, Jonathan Holden, Judith Ortiz Cofer), novelists (Robin Hemley, Wright Morris), a biographer (Nancy Willard) and a critic (the late Virginia Faulkner). Despite this diversity, childhood and family are frequent topics. Holden's ""Tea and Sympathy"" recalls how his struggle to accept his identical twin's homosexuality complicated his adolescent isolation and fed his burgeoning interest in poetry. Hemley's wry ""Jinx"" recounts how childhood guilt over the death of friends and relatives shaped his self-image as an oddball. Stephen K. Bauer sounds a similar note of teenage angst in ""Reading the Currents,"" a poignant tale of adolescent obsession with fishing. Cofer's ""Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood"" and Jo Ann Beard's ""Cousins"" evocatively explore the tight familial bonds between women in New York City and the rural South. Though this volume commemorates the literary magazine's 75th anniversary, it's less a testament to the journal's vitality than to the endurance and dexterity of the essay form. A few pieces fall flat, because they're dated (Faulkner's 1932 travel essay seems as antique as a Victorian valentine) or too brief to answer satisfactorily the questions they pose. A notable exception is Albert Alvaro Rios's compact ""Translating Translation: Finding the Beginning,"" which swiftly and deftly illustrates the difficult nuances of literary translation with earthy anecdotes that demonstrate how ""Language is more than what we say.... It is the how as much as the what, form as much as content, intent as much as words."" Any reader who values the essay form will find pleasures in this volume. (Dec.)