Gail Scott Nightboat Books ($15.95) by erica kaufman In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James posits that the novel “must take itself seriously for the public to take it so.” Gail Scott’s most recent work, The Obituary, proves that not only should the novel itself take itself “seriously,” but the novel as a form must also […]

Bronwen Hruska Pegasus ($25) by T.K. Dalton Bronwen Hruska's Accelerated combines a social satire with a literary thriller to explore the lengths to which parents will go to give their child a perceived advantage in a hyper-competitive world. The novel’s detailed, dishy taxonomy of New York City’s “1%” is rendered through the lens of newly single father […]

Love Stories Ludmila Petrushevskaya translated by Anna Summers Penguin Books ($15) by Alta Ifland After having been blacklisted by the Soviet authorities for two decades, Ludmila Petrushevskaya is now considered one of the major contemporary Russian writers. In 2009 Penguin Books published her collectionThere Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (translated […]

Kevin Dowd Roundabout Press ($9.95) by Benjamin Woodard It only takes a minor event—that one extra drink, a nosy neighbor rapping on the front door, an alienated spouse’s unexpected entrance—to spark the collapse of a relaxing summer escape. Such is the existence of Jack Smith, the troubled lead in Kevin Dowd’s comedic debut, The Fourth of […]

Mikita Brottman Nine-Banded Books ($13) by John Pistelli Mikita Brottman’s Thirteen Girls, a superb story cycle fictionalizing the last days of famous serial killers' female victims, opens with an epigraph from a W. H. Auden ballad: . . . the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. These lines announce […]

Carter Sickels Bloomsbury ($16) by Rebecca Kuensting Ecological depletion, drug use, rural depopulation, and disillusioned youth in an age of shifting social norms and environmental instability: in his insightful debut novel, The Evening Hour, Portland writer Carter Sickels imposes these timely troubles on the inhabitants of Dove Creek, a mining town in West Virginia. In doing […]

Marie-Helene Bertino University of Iowa Press ($16) by Max Vanderhyden The eight stories in Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut collection occupy worlds both recognizable and resolutely askew. Drawing deeply on American pop-culture, Bertino takes quotidian dramas—stories of heartbreak and alienation, depression and fraught familial relationships—and amplifies them with playful and fantastical conceits. (College misfits wield superpowers; a […]

Collected Poems, 1965-2010 Michael Heller Nightboat Books ($22.95) by Robert Zaller Michael Heller is a distinguished American poet in the lineage of George Oppen and Armand Schwerner. The publication of his collected poems, assembling the work of nearly half a century, gives us an opportunity to survey a career very much still in progress, one […]

John Yau Copper Canyon Press ($15) by John James Some readers may find it strange that John Yau’s new book, his thirteenth collection of poetry, is titled Further Adventures in Monochrome. For one, the work is colored by the various objects and voices inhabiting it—nothing feels single-hued here. What’s more, the various transformations throughout the book […]

Michael Collier W. W. Norton ($25.95) by Barrett Warner Some critics call Michael Collier an associative poet, which has always sounded a little redundant to me. Generalities trend when we can’t find an angle. When something is round it’s hard to know where it begins or how it ends and Collier writes very round, four-dimensional poems. Some […]