In Like Company: The Salt River Review & Porch Anthology, edited by James Cervantes, is equal parts reminiscent and refreshing measured over the course of thirty plus years of poetry and fiction.

For longtime readers of the former print journal Porch (1977-1981), and its later online counterpart the Salt River Review (1997-2010), this collection serves as a spring well of memories, eliciting fond recollections of such things as “The shared silence / in the land of ants. / The sleep of lizards / that never hear the bell. / Talk of fish / about things liquid. / Stories of the spider / at war with the mosquitoes” (9).

John Williams’s Stoner — which this month is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a tastefully geometric hardback edition from New York Review Books — is a quiet novel; a portrait painted in sober tones of the life of a somber, unremarkable man, a story that unfolds softly and with grace. The book treads along with William Stoner, from his birth and childhood on a small family farm in rural Missouri, to university where he is awakened to his inner life, on through World War I and the Great Depression, his years as an instructor, his marriage, the birth of his family, the destruction of it, and finally, inevitably, his death. It’s the stuff of Russian literature, and a novel that has become more necessary today than ever before.