M. T. Anderson Beach Lane Books ($16.99) by William Alexander M. T. Anderson has written another Pals in Peril Tale. If you have children, or know any children, or have ever in your life seen or heard of children, use that as an excuse to find and read this book immediately. Agent Q, or The Smell of […]

Gina Frangello Emergency Press ($15) by Spencer Dew The need for a hole—as one character in this collection describes sexual desire—is not about lack, but fit. It’s a hunger for resistance, for such close envelopment that any metaphorical “hole” or space between two people might, as they merge together, seem temporarily erased. Yet the phrasing, […]

Dawn Paul Marick Press ($16.95) by Ellen Orleans How do you understand a taciturn and truculent father who died when you were twenty? Lacking family recollections, Dawn Paul has interwoven real and imagined narratives of her father, Philip, to create this novel inspired by real-life events. Understated, The Country of Loneliness mimics living with an alcoholic: it’s […]

Louis de Bernières Vintage U.K. by John Cox In two of the most touching scenes in this collection of connected stories, women cavort fantastically with their long-dead lovers in a hopeful reminder of the power of memory amidst inevitable change. These two scenes bookend Louis de Bernières’s Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village, and capture something […]

Paul Auster Henry Holt and Company ($25) by Ben Woodard Though initially intended as a warning, the phrase “in these uncertain times” has developed into a parody of itself, a safety net for the rat-a-tat lingo of reporters and politicians discussing the troubles of America. Yet, the phrase itself seems to be little more than […]

P. G. Wodehouse W. W. Norton & Company ($18.95) by Brian Conn For those not already familiar with P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves material, a sketch: these are funny books about rich British people, set more or less in the first half of the twentieth century. Bertie Wooster, the narrator, is a genial young upper-class twit […]

Leïla Marouane translated by Alison Anderson Europa Editions ($14) by Spencer Dew In Leïla Marouane’s intriguing new novel, the main character is a bundle of contradictions. Mohamed used to be, as he says, “the good Muslim, the kind of Islamist—nowadays we would say ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘terrorist’—who was respected and solicited for advice by the entire […]

Gary Shteyngart Random House ($26) by Mark Budman “By reading this sign you have denied existence of the object [the tank] and implied consent.” This sign welcomes the protagonist of Super Sad True Love Story, a Jewish-Russian-American with Ashkenazi eyes and a penchant for Asian girls, back to the U.S. of the American Restoration Authority. In […]

Robert Steiner Counterpoint ($12.95) by John Madera The power of Robert Steiner’s novella Negative Space comes not from its subject matter but from its prose, which offers a kind of lyrical philosophy of loss, memory, and pain; a taxonomy, or rather a “postmortem,” as the unnamed narrator calls it, of his marriage’s dissolution, the failure itself a […]

Tom McCarthy Knopf ($25.95) by Will Fertman An ambitious bildungsroman that made it to the Man Booker Prize shortlist, Tom McCarthy’s C follows our hero Serge Carrefax from his birth in late 19th-century England to his occult shipboard death in the 1920s. The saga in between gives the author an opportunity to sing some very familiar songs […]