Edited by Andrew Schelling Oxford University Press ($55) by Graziano Krätli Religions typically evolve from individual and spontaneous to collective and organized forms of experience. Each time an intensely subjective spiritual awakening solidifies into an increasingly complex and codified set of beliefs, practices, and rituals, a reaction usually occurs, in which one or more individuals […]

Macgregor Card Fence Books ($16) by Alexander Dickow Poetry Is No Joke (But an Endless and Repetitive One) The quest for originality yields a great deal of hip and hollow idiosyncrasy, and only occasionally, something whose oddity seems driven by an earnest puzzling about language and the world rather than by self-indulgent posturing. One of […]

Edited by Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten Yale University Press ($27) by Justin Maxwell This anthology offers a rare combination of breadth and depth, without becoming a brick-heavy tome of plays. While such a collection seems destined for the hands of undergraduates, it’s a useful text for anyone wanting greater entrée into the world of […]

Helen DeWitt New Directions ($24.95) by Brent Cunningham Given the sundry occupations of the last couple months, the timing of Helen DeWitt’s wicked new satire of corporate America probably could not have been better. As some other reviews of the book have noted, satire has not been a favored form in contemporary American fiction in […]

Erin Morgenstern Doubleday ($26.95) by Greg Baldino Authors, at their best, are illusionists. They shuffle language like cards, draw plot twists from up their sleeve, and misdirect your attention to the dancing girls while the denouement appears on the page. The last several years have seen a number of books, for adults and children alike, […]

Colson Whitehead Doubleday ($25.95) by Victoria Blake By his own admission, Colson Whitehead—MacArthur genius, Whiting winner, PEN/Faulkner finalist—is uncomfortable saying the word “zombie” fifty times a day. He’s “getting used to it,” he told Terry Gross. He’s saying it to the New York Times and he’s saying it to NPR and he’s saying it to audiences across […]

João Ubaldo Ribeiro translated by Clifford E. Landers Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95) by Shane Joaquin Jimenez João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s House of the Fortunate Buddhasrevels in the bygone Olympia Press tradition of literary erotica. Recently translated into English, the novel was originally commissioned by Brazilian publishers Editora Objetiva for a series on the seven daily sins. Ribeiro […]

Terry Bisson PM Press ($14.95) by Jade Bové Terry Bisson’s latest collection of short stories, TVA Baby, presents thirteen science fiction tales that focus on voyeurism and violence—and sometimes both. The title story starts the collection with a dose of hyper violence that unfolds with dark humor. The main character, a southerner whose Yankee father came […]

Neal Stephenson William Morrow ($35) by Alice Dodge Neal Stephenson is a rare breed of writer. His early novels—most notably Snow Crash—helped found the cyberpunk genre and gave us a dystopian vision of an ultra-capitalist future, one which included a virtual universe not very different from the online multiplayer video games that have become ordinary in […]

David Bergen Counterpoint ($15.95) by Matthew Duffus Morris Schutt joins the ranks of fictional midlife crisis sufferers—a group varied enough to include both Moses Herzog and Tony Soprano—in David Bergen’s Giller Prize-winning novel The Matter with Morris. Morris suffers from the typical career and personal problems of the genre, but what makes the novel so fascinating […]