DISCOVERIES

What You Have Left

A Novel

Will Allison

Free Press: 214 pp., $23

“I was sentenced to life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in the summer of 1976.” So begins Will Allison’s debut novel. Holly’s father left her with a suicidal grandfather after her mother died. From age 5, she struggled to save her grandfather’s life and understand why her father left. She sifts through the lives of her parents and grandparents, gauging the decisions and events that shaped them. Anxiety and guilt are hard-wired into Holly’s psyche; the novel’s world is stark, harsh, almost entirely without landscape. Its characters slam through life embattled, weary, looking for missing pieces that most often remain missing.

--

Mandarins

Stories

Rynosuke Akutagawa

Translated from the Japanese by Charles DeWolf

Archipelago Books: 200 pp., $16 paper

THESE glittering stories are the smallest divisible literary parts: moods, scenes, bits of conversation, set in trains, behind windows, in quiet rooms. Often, the action is limited to reverberations around harmony, like Meiji-era paintings: brief disappointment, shifts in feeling. “The scene had been vividly and poignantly burned into my mind,” thinks a man, watching a woman throwing oranges from a train window, “and from this, welling up within me, came a strangely bright and buoyant feeling.” The characters share a haughtiness, with their snippets of French and high literary tastes (they read Strindberg, Dostoevsky and Wilde). The refined attitude and exquisite detail (clouds, autumn grasses, lanterns, bowls) make the stories piercing, emotional, sometimes oddly painful.

--

Chemistry and Other Stories

Ron Rash

Picador: 230 pp., $13 paper

THE characters in these carefully wrought stories have modest expectations for their lives in Appalachia. But the world impinges on them, and the pressure for change builds to a low roar in almost every story. The mother of a murdered son, an addled chemistry teacher, a doctor who visits a soldier whose life she saved in Korea -- their lives teeter on similar edges. Old men outside the local store, “sunning in front like reptiles,” big fish in the Tuckaseegee River, an owl song in the night -- this is the past. Defaulted loans, battered wives, young men drinking themselves to death -- this is the future.

--

Of Song and Water

A Novel

Joseph Coulson

Archipelago Books: 272 pp., $25

IN real life, we often go on after trauma and tragedy. In fiction, tragedy sticks to the page, fixed in a character’s personality. Coleman Moore, a jazz guitarist, sits on his boat drinking vodka and contemplating his father’s death, his grandfather’s cruelty and his wife’s estrangement. He thinks about music, his own and his legendary mentor’s. He tries to be who he once was and finds his path blocked by his own mistakes and those of his ancestors. Joseph Coulson’s writing makes a reader hear jazz. There’s a bounce in Moore’s utter failures; he’s held aloft by something we all want a piece of: maybe it’s music, maybe it’s something else.

--

susan.reynolds@latimes.com