Ones that got away

At my age, my memory is completely shot, which has led me to a new enthusiasm: Books for Those With an Attention Deficit Who Love Reading -- books that allow you to stumble, pick yourself up, doze a little, start again, forget what you learned a day ago but enjoy the exquisite experience. In fits and starts, I am currently dazzled out of my stupor by “Mr. Apology,” a collection by the perfect writer, Alec Wilkinson. Twenty-one essays in three parts yet made whole by Wilkinson’s distinct, insightful and witty sensibility. My favorite piece is “Fatherhood,” in which he describes the love he has for his son. The story is both universal and specific, and that’s what makes it so great. Indeed, it transcends the parental dynamic and makes me think about what is embedded in any close relationship. To read this book is to have the privilege of knowing Alec Wilkinson.

Richard Avedon is a photographer whose images have appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, the New Yorker and other publications. His work has been collected in several books, including “Evidence: 1944-1994,” “In the American West” and “Portraits.”

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Michael O’Donovan was born in Cork in 1903. When he was a young poet and theatrical, producing Ibsen and Chekhov in the city, a local clergyman predicted that “Mike the moke would go down to posterity at the head of the pagan Dublin muses.” In fact, Mike the moke went down to short-memoried posterity as the great short-story writer Frank O’Connor. Yeats claimed that O’Connor was “doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia” -- useful, but as half-true as such comparisons tend to be. Like a classic oral storyteller, he lulls you from gentle beginnings whose charm you half-suspect to complicated truths and bitter wisdoms. Why is he so forgotten? Lack of personal myth? Overproduction? Whichever way, it’s a disappointment and a publishing shame that in his centenary year not a single one of his books is in print in Britain. Is it any better in the States? If not, the Internet will find you a secondhand Penguin of “My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories” or perhaps “The Stories of Frank O’Connor,” which came out in his 50th year. Take it from there -- though if you fail to find “In the Train,” a 20th century masterpiece, then I’d call it a day.

Julian Barnes is the author of “Flaubert’s Parrot,” “England, England” and “Something to Declare.”

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If first books of merit were duly noted, “Agitations” by Arthur Krystal should by now have firmly established its author’s reputation as an original essayist and cultural critic. The subjects of the 16 pieces range from reading current novels to writing poetry and from the role of death to that of religion. They are all engagingly provocative by their matured thought and fresh conversational prose. What adds to the weight of these reasoned convictions is that they take account of the most approved contemporary notions, including the lively brood born of Theory. It is a guided tour through today’s intellectual domain, and though as such it is bound to cause disagreements in readers already committed to positions, it will instruct the rest while giving every peruser the pleasure of seeing a fine mind at work.

Jacques Barzun is the author of some 30 books, including “From Dawn to Decadence,” and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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My major literary pleasure this year has been rereading Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” This has been called an imitation of Proust -- its 12-book sequence is rather longer than Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” but it is in fact quite a different sort of novel -- in a way more like a highly socialized and intellectualized version of P.G. Wodehouse. Some readers I respect can’t stand it; others adore it: It is that sort of book.

Nick Jenkins, the narrator, is a bore in the best sense, if there can be such a thing. He “ponders” all the time about his own life and lives of other people, and yet the result of his ponderings is always worth our close attention and is often extremely funny as well. But the real joy of the book is the gallery of characters whom Jenkins meets in the “Dance” between childhood and moderate old age, during peace and war. The author’s triumph here shows that the old-fashioned idea of the “character,” once thought discredited in terms of the forward-looking novel, can still be very much alive. Every reader of the series falls for Widmerpool, the bumbling but formidable presence who haunts the narrator continually throughout his career. Next year I shall read the whole series again, and I am already looking forward to that. Need I say more?

John Bayley is a critic and novelist who taught at Oxford for more than 30 years and is the author of many books, including “Leo Tolstoy,” “The Red Hat” and “Elegy for Iris,” a memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch.

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“Tales of Galicia,” by Andrzej Stasiuk, is a book of stories about a forsaken village in southern Poland after the end of the world -- or is it only after a week’s drinking or a sleepless night’s remembering? -- that describes the soul of a village community with more authenticity than anything else I have read. The author, a young poet, influenced probably by the great Platonov, can read stars by their reflection in an abandoned well and, reading them, make us recognize, laughing and crying, what we had never before remembered. Published in English by Twisted Spoon Press, a small, courageous house in Prague, it deserves wide distribution.

“The Cuttlefish” is a novel by Maryline Desbiolles that is about preparing a dish of cuttlefish for some friends invited to dinner. It is written with a sharp knife, glistening fingers and love. It’s about dying and appetites, spoons and the infinite, blood and mirrors. Presented with the calm of a letter being read in a painting by Vermeer. I urge you to read it too.

John Berger is the author of many books, including “The Shape of a Pocket,” “Pig Earth” and “Ways of Seeing.”

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One of the best books I’ve read this fall is Sherman Alexie’s latest collection of stories, “Ten Little Indians.” All the stories deal with Indians and Indian identity (no, the author does not choose to define his characters as “Native Americans,” so please save your postage), and yet he is careful to let his themes percolate beneath the surface -- the message is powerful, but the drive and joy of the fiction always predominate. In the opening story, wonderful for its richness of observation, a confused young Spokane Indian goes looking for a minor Spokane poet who in a drunken revelry gave away all 300 copies of his only (self-) published book, save for the one copy she finds in a library. Two other stories -- “Can I Get a Witness?” in particular -- address directly and poignantly the dislocations of the 9/11 attacks, something so many of us have been unable to do. But the real prize of the book, the story that brought me to it, is “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” which appeared in the New Yorker earlier this year. This piece is stunning, both hilarious and wrenching, an account of an alcoholic’s self-delusion that rises to the highest plane of artistic beauty. I weep for that story. And in so doing, I recommend Alexie with all my heart.

From ‘Ten Little Indians’

I loved Kay, the young Korean woman who worked the register. She was the daughter of the owners and sang all day.

“I love you,” I said when I handed her the money.

“You always say you love me,” she said.

“That’s because I will always love you.”

“You are a sentimental fool.”

“I’m a romantic old man.”

“Too old for me.”

“I know I’m too old for you, but I can dream.”

“Okay,” she said. “I agree to be a part of your dreams, but I will only hold your hand in your dreams. No kissing and no sex. Not even in your dreams.”

“Okay,” I said. “No sex. Just romance.”

“Goodbye, Jackson Jackson, my love, I will see you soon.”

I left the store, walked over to Occidental Park, sat on a bench, and smoked my cigar all the way down.

Ten minutes after I finished the cigar, I scratched my first lottery ticket and won nothing....

Ten minutes later, I scratched my other lottery ticket and won a free ticket, a small consolation and one more chance to win money.

I walked back to Kay.

“Jackson Jackson,” she said. “Have you come back to claim my heart?”

“I won a free ticket,” I said.

“Just like a man,” she said. “You love money and power more than you love me.”

From “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” in “Ten Little Indians: Stories” by Sherman Alexie (Grove: 244 pp., $24)

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of many novels and short story collections, including “Drop City,” “The Tortilla Curtain” and “The Road to Wellville.”

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J. Glenn Gray’s “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle” is a book that constantly has to be rediscovered. When it first appeared in 1959, 14 years after Gray’s service in World War II ended, it was generally ignored. After it was reissued in 1970 with a preface by Hannah Arendt, it found a new audience in the context of the war in Vietnam, only to lapse into relative obscurity again. Gray spent four years with armored and infantry divisions in Italy, France and Central Europe after being drafted the same day he received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. He is preoccupied with the human paradoxes of war, “the delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction,” along with the necessary delusion “that death is something that happens only to others,” the need to demonize the enemy in modern warfare and the pressure of guilt and conscience. “The Warriors” is that rare book of philosophy that stays close to real, concrete (and bloody) experience, and that rare war book that turns away from strategy and tactics to meditate on the meaning of war for the individual soldier.

Leo Braudy is the author of “The Frenzy of Renown” and, most recently, “From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.”

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“Wintering,” the intuitive novel or biography of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses, hasn’t been overlooked. Reviews were excellent. All the same, this book ought to be studied by anyone who cares about the neglected art of English prose. Moses describes a frigid London flat where Plath lived with her husband, Ted Hughes: “The electric iron seethes, steaming the windows blue. An ice age of black corridors, creaking floorboards, primitive fear. Paring knives glint menace from the bottom of the sink in the kitchen downstairs. Copper oozes green, dripping acid. Dripping grottoes, echoing caverns.... The gills of her manuscript ripple in the wall heater’s faint eddy.” And we observe Plath coldly estimate her husband, “his body hanging heavily on its frame as he reads in the chair by the windows. The poems before him now are evidentiary, the tally of his crimes.” On and on, this extraordinary swirl. The aged professor whose face “falls away in oozing chunks ... old meat falling off the bones.” Foggy London: “Black silhouettes of approaching pedestrians erupt like bathers from a colorless ocean.”

Moses’ graphic understanding of the tormented poet is unique. So inseparable are biographer and subject that it becomes difficult to think of them as different women. An unexpected, indelible book.

Evan S. Connell is the author of more than 17 books, including “Mrs. Bridge,” “Son of the Morning Star” and “Deus Lo Volt!”

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At a 2002 Fourth of July celebration in Ripley, W.Va., President Bush said that military service was “the highest form of citizenship,” and in its fact sheet that day the White House press office added: “Service in the United States military, particularly in times of conflict, is the ultimate act of patriotism” (source: www.whitehouse.gov). But of course that highest form of citizenship and ultimate act of patriotism is honored in this time of conflict more in rhetoric than in fact. For those most belligerently convinced of the righteousness of our current Middle Eastern adventures, military service is not for them or their children but for someone else and someone else’s kids. I thought of this when reading Paul Fussell’s “The Boys’ Crusade,” about the 18- and 19-year-old draftee college boys who were the shock troops of our victory in Europe in 1944-45, when the nation’s manpower pool was beginning to run dry. They were scared, sometimes shockingly ill -- led by company officers only slightly older than they and by generals who never bothered to visit the front and who again and again ordered frontal assaults against an experienced German army fighting desperately to preserve its homeland. Their casualties were grotesque, but these young men of privilege and educational entitlement (my then 18-year-old brother was one) not only endured but prevailed. Theirs was the ultimate act of patriotism. Today we have volunteers, not draftees. But think how our military might be transformed if Jenna and Barbara Bush and Chelsea Clinton and the college-age sons and daughters of our political class saw fit to engage in the highest form of citizenship.

John Gregory Dunne is a screenwriter and the author of many books, including “Monster: Living off the Big Screen” and “True Confessions.”

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Mary Antin published “The Promised Land” in 1912 when she was 30. In her introduction to this autobiographical account, she says, “My age alone, my true age, would be reason enough for my writing. I began life in the Middle Ages, as I shall prove, and here am I still, your contemporary in the twentieth century, thrilling with your latest thought.” The author is acutely aware that whole centuries and cultures were needed to make her, and out of herself she makes a book that blazes with an uncanny intensity. It’s as if all of history, particularized in Antin and modulated by her circumstances, her subtlety, her charm and her astonishing powers of observation, were transcribing itself on the pages.

Antin came to the U.S. with her family in 1894 from the area of Eastern Europe she refers to as “the prison of the Pale.” This was the Pale of Settlement, the region where Jews were allowed to live, though even there to live only under the constant constraints and terrors of a murderous anti-Semitism encouraged by the church and sponsored by the state. What she recounts of her childhood in the shtetl and of her immigration is so vivid and so precise, one actually feels that one is experiencing as one reads.

She was recognized as a prodigy and applauded for her remarkable gifts of mind and character, but it was that very singularity that equipped her to speak, as she put it, for thousands. In fact, she speaks for millions, and as there will no doubt always be people who are forced to flee from place to place, her book cannot go out of date -- though its relationship to its readers is bound to be a variable one. It must have been very painful to read, on its publication, Antin’s description of her family’s desperate struggle in the slums. But her blissful portraits of the public schools, for instance, where the system of the time allowed compassionate and committed teachers to make a great mark on their pupils, and of the beautifully maintained public libraries are perhaps even more painful to read now when we consider what Antin might encounter if she were to arrive in the U.S. today. This is a hard book to put down, but it’s an impossible one in which to make swift progress, because it’s irresistible to read sentences over and over, to call your friends and read them passages too.

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of several story collections, including “All Around Atlantis” and “The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg.”

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“In Search of Klingsor” by the young Mexican author Jorge Volpi is a brilliant mixture of spy thriller, scientific investigation and historical novel in which an officer of the U.S. Occupation forces in post-Nazi Germany unravels the plots, deceits, intellectual bravery and moral concerns surrounding the fabrication and deployment of atomic arms. Engrossing, entertaining, troubling, it concerns us all.

Carlos Fuentes is the author of many books, including “The Old Gringo,” “The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World” and “The Years With Laura Diaz.”

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I’m embarrassed to elect for a wider readership “Turbott Wolfe” by William Plomer, since it is at my suggestion that it has been selected for publication in the Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery series as a neglected masterpiece. Plomer was born during his English parents’ colonial sojourn in South Africa. Of this African origin he would say, with his unfailing wit, he couldn’t claim himself a South African “since nobody, if a cat happened to have kittens in an oven, regards them as biscuits.” After an upper-class education in England, he was dispatched back to South Africa to run a farm store in a remote area. There, age 19, he began to write a novel in the Conradian mode of a story told him by an old man whose African experience it had been and, of course, the young man was reliving. Having written it in pencil, he packed it off to Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their Hogarth Press. They recognized that here was a work waiting to be written: and now had been, by an unknown 22-year-old. They published “Turbott Wolfe” in 1925. Seventy-eight years later, the novel is still a pyrotechnic presence in the bulging canon of anti-colonialist fiction. Satire invaded by sexual emotion, disgust at human behavior countered by confrontation with tenderness: The extraordinary originality of the novel lies in both subject -- the colonizer and the colonized -- and style. There is nothing else like it.

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature and is the author of many novels, short story collections and essays, including “The Burger’s Daughter,” “The House Gun” and “Living in Hope and History.”

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This year I reread Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road” for the first time in 30 years and experienced the more than pleasurable shock of discovering that a book I had remembered as good is, in fact, a minor masterpiece. Among American novels whose seeds are planted in the Man-in-the-Gray-Flannel-Suit generation, this one is in a class by itself. Set in 1955 in an East Coast suburban town, it recounts the history of Frank and April Wheeler, living in a tract house with their two small children, Frank working at a dead-end job in the city, April trapped in the kitchen, both feeling emptied out and neither knowing how, from the gloriously expectant people they had been only 10 years earlier, they have got to the place they now find themselves: a situation that would supply American writers -- from the sentimental to the cynical -- with material for the next 40 years.

What sets “Revolutionary Road” apart from many if not all of its companion fictions is the deeply concentrated, deeply courteous attention that Yates pays to his characters and their fate. The intentness of the writer’s gaze accords each and every one of them -- Frank, April, the children, the neighbors, the office workers -- such serious regard that their collective existence achieves pathos. It is precisely the absence of irony as well as sentimentality that endows the book with power and an astonishing beauty. But what makes it feel large is the brilliancy of its pacing. “Revolutionary Road” is, in fact, a textbook example of how a fine writer excavates his own feeling intelligence for the purpose of tracing accurately the transformation of these ordinary lives out of attractive cockiness into prolonged self-deception into the starkness of a conclusion that is persuasively tragic. Not knowing how to live, Yates’ characters are doomed by life’s refusal to forgive them their own ignorance. Because he has tracked these people so carefully, their failing humanity penetrates the writer, and he grieves for them. As do we. Now that I have grieved, the book is mine for life.

Vivian Gornick is the author of “The Situation and the Story,” “Fierce Attachments,” “Approaching Eye Level” and “The End of the Novel of Love.”

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Although I was greatly stirred by the portraits of mongrel England offered in Monica Ali’s wise and profoundly sympathetic “Brick Lane” and in Caryl Phillips’ riveting “A Distant Shore,” and although I was completely absorbed by the moral conundrums thrown up in Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” the one book that I wish had found more readers this year was Nino Ricci’s “Testament.” Ricci’s earlier trilogy, about Italians migrating to Canada, had established him in my mind as a writer of impeccable craft, ready to take us into the vexations of his native Catholicism; but nothing in those more conventional novels had prepared me for his latest.

“Testament” is a hypnotic, deeply lyrical presentation of four gospels that tell Jesus’ life from the point of view of the Virgin, Judas, a local shepherd and a woman who loves him. And although it clearly draws upon the “hidden gospels” currently being unearthed with unsettling regularity, it goes far beyond their contentiousness to take us into a Jesus who is the more compelling for being so conflicted, outside the comprehension of even himself. He is, in Ricci’s telling, a son who confounds his mother with his rebellions, who frustrates his disciples with his maneuvers, who surprises even himself with his prophetic moments. And throwing us into his orbit -- re-creating, in his incantatory prose, the very aroma and the wild, sorcery-filled world through which Jesus walked -- Ricci somehow succeeds in making the man and the questions he posed fresh and complex and inexhaustible. Norman Mailer and others have been along the same course in recent years, but none with the transparency and spellbound beauty of Ricci.

From ‘Testament’

... at the sight of Kephas, the girl, who despite her rantings had appeared relatively harmless until that moment, suddenly lunged at the poor man and began hitting at him with her rag-covered fists. It took both Yaqob and Yohanan to pull her off him.

The mother, by this point, was practically prostrate with apology.

“Master, please,” she said, nearly incoherent, “master.”

Yeshua had wisely been holding himself back a bit from the fray. But now he came forward to put a hand on the girl’s forehead. The gesture seemed to calm her.

“Bring her into the sitting room,” he said.

His men sat her on a bench in the parlour. She was still mumbling in her indecipherable speech but seemed to have retreated into herself, staring out glassy-eyed as if entirely unaware of us or her surroundings. At Yeshua’s instructions the servant boy brought a basin of water and a cloth, and Yeshua proceeded to dab at the grime on the girl’s face and at the streaks of dried blood from her scratches.... All the while the girl grew increasingly placid, until her ramblings had died down to a whisper.

“Bring her something to eat,” Yeshua said, after he had her hands free, and when a bowl of soup was brought out she set into it like someone famished.

From a pouch on his belt Yeshua pulled out some bits of herb and told the girl’s mother to make a brew from it to help calm the girl if she should suffer another attack.

“Is it a demon, master?” the woman asked.

“The girl is pregnant. When you find who’s responsible, you’ll have your demon.”

From “Testament: A Novel” by Nino Ricci (Houghton Mifflin: 458 pp., $25)

Pico Iyer is the author of several novels and works of nonfiction, including “Abandon: A Novel” and “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home.”

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What distinguishes “Imperial America” by John Newhouse from so many other books on a similar theme is the elegance of the prose and the acuity of the argument. Its thesis is that tremendous opportunities were squandered by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11 and the result is an America more vulnerable to terror, a Middle East more unstable than ever and a Western alliance in crisis. Newhouse, the former diplomatic correspondent for the New Yorker, includes in his bill of particulars brief sketches of the usual characters, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Chirac and others, notably a hapless Colin Powell. There’s fresh material on political changes in Iran, the threat posed by North Korea and Washington’s apparently boundless enthusiasm for Ariel Sharon’s vision of the Middle East. Toward the end of his book, Newhouse writes, “The administration is trying to create reality, not deal with it.”

Ward Just is the author of “A Dangerous Friend,” “Echo House,” “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert” and other books.

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The best book I read in the last year was David Malouf’s “The Great World,” which originally came out in 1990. It took me until now to catch up with it, because I have been steadily working my way through all of Malouf’s fiction, all of which is worth reading. This novel, however, is the best of the best. Plot summary tells you very little: It is the story of two Australian men (Malouf himself is Australian) who meet in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and remain friendly -- or at least connected -- for the rest of their lives, despite the disparities in their paths through the world. One is a self-made wealthy businessman, the other quite a poor man from an almost nonexistent small town, and we follow their stories separately and together. But that is the least of it. There is something about the narrative that is Faulknerian (the poorer man has a demented sister, and we see things sometimes through her viewpoint) and something else that is Jamesian or maybe even Dostoevskyan, in the sense that we go deeply into the interior lives of these two men. I don’t think I have ever read a book in which I had a stronger sense of gaining access to someone else’s mind; the characters are truly compelling and alive, so that you actually have the sensation, at times, of experiencing their thoughts as your own. And I have rarely read another book that I was so sorry to finish: I actually found myself putting it down, at times, just to save more for later. No part of the book is weaker than any other (the scenes set in the prisoner-of-war camp, for instance, are magnificent, but so are the scenes of daily Australian life), and I am just waiting for enough time to pass so that I can read it again.

Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of the Threepenny Review and the author of several books, including “Nothing Remains the Same: Reading and Remembering” and “The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters.”

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Jane Bowles did not write many books, but those she did are unique, with a flavor that is not describable. “Two Serious Ladies” is a quietly funny book, but there is nothing quiet about the two ladies’ adventures. Devoted to spiritual uplift, they find themselves in whorehouses, explore the lowest of lower depths, end as call girls, always with the most refined vocabulary. The talk echoes like Harold Pinter’s, and a line of dialogue is as good as paragraphs of plot or like a suggestion for a novel. There is nothing in literature like Jane Bowles. Her fans include Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

Doris Lessing is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including “The Golden Notebook,” “The Fifth Child,” the memoir “Under My Skin” and, most recently, “The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels.”

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“Mailman” by J. Robert Lennon is a recent favorite of mine. A phantasmagoria of American paranoia and self-loathing in the person of a deranged but somehow good-hearted middle-aged mail carrier in steep decline, the book hums with a kind of chipper angst as the character careens from one humiliation to the next. The book felt like a compulsive bad dream, impossible to shake. It reminded me of the very best of Thomas Berger and Stephen Dixon, writ young.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of “The Fortress of Solitude” and “Motherless Brooklyn,” among other novels.

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I am sure some excellent books published in 2003 did not attract all the attention they deserved; yet, as I live far from the great centers of literary activity, I am poorly informed on this subject. Still, I wish to mention one book -- neither new nor neglected (first published 20 years ago, it has often been reprinted) -- which I have just reread; once again, it moved me more than many recent publications: Norman Malcolm’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir.”

This modest little book (120 pages) was written by a former student and close friend of Wittgenstein; it presents the vivid portrait of a man who sought truth not merely with his intelligence but with his life, in a pursuit that was heroic and poignant. He was a philosopher who believed that there was no use in studying philosophy if it did not generate greater decency in the handling of our humble and daily moral challenges. He was often overwhelmed with the feeling that our lives are ugly and our minds in the dark -- a feeling that brought him close to despair and madness. He put demands of absolute sincerity both on himself and on his friends -- demands that, most of the time, condemned him to harsh solitude. And yet, in the end, as he lay dying of cancer, his last words were: “Tell all my friends that I’ve had a wonderful life.” In the light of his fiercely unhappy existence, this final utterance acquires a power that is mysteriously uplifting.

Here may also be the place to recall Wittgenstein’s unusual (yet highly effective) aesthetic criterion for distinguishing true literature from mere printed matter (commenting on Tolstoy): “There’s a real man, who has a right to write.”

Simon Leys is the author of “Chinese Shadows,” “The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics” and “The Angel and the Octopus,” a collection of essays.

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I was shocked and delighted by the mysteries contained in a new collection of stories I read this year, “Goblin Fruit,” by one David Marshall Chan. Mysteries abound here, in fact, in that the stories are often entirely laterally constructed, full of wisps of narrative that never pan out in the usual way. And there are obsessions in abundance: upstart religious movements, like Scientology and the “Course in Miracles”; degraded literature, like the Hardy Boys; and wisps of music and movies. Everywhere, Hollywood and the recent history of Los Angeles loom large. What binds the book together is a first-person voice both limpid and opaque, as if Robert Walser or Thomas Bernhard had collided with an Asian kid in a comic book store in West Hollywood. “Goblin Fruit” is a marvelous debut, probably the most stunning debut of the year, one that gives much promise of great things to come.

Rick Moody is the author of the novels “Ice Storm,” “Garden State” and “Purple America” as well as “The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions.”

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Unflinchingly honest, superbly penned, very moving and often hilarious, “My Father and Myself,” the record of life as a gay man, is one of the great classics of the memoir genre. The distinguished British belletrist J.R. Ackerley, who had been openly gay since his youth, underwent a crisis of identity when he learned, after his father’s death, that his father had led a secret life as a homosexual. His search for the details of his father’s complex sexuality, his urgent need to understand a parent whose true character may always remain beyond his reach, poignantly mirror Ackerley’s utopian quest for that Ideal Lover who never seems to materialize. A remarkable book that chronicles the obstacles many of us confront when we explore the paradoxical nature of filial bonds and the mystery of parental identity.

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Francine du Plessix Gray is the author of “Rage and Fire,” “Lovers and Tyrants,” “Soviet Women,” “At Home With the Marquis de Sade” and a biography of Simone Weil for the Penguin Lives series.

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It’s usually difficult to say exactly when a poet becomes indispensable to the cosmos of poetry, but in this case it’s not at all: With “Middle Earth,” Henri Cole has established himself as one of the essential poets of our time, a poet more than merely gifted, more than merely one of any several. Cole’s work has a concentration of attention, a daring sensitivity and a complex conceptual voice utterly his own, and the poems manifest all of this; they have a sensual density, a figurative subtlety and a symbolic dexterity and weight unlike anything in any other poetry I know. He has written a book of enviable poetic and intellectual truth and of an almost shocking emotional intensity. There are poems and sequences of poems that touch on and elaborate a variety of themes; many are sad, some wry, some sometimes terribly funny, and I admire them all. One, “Ape House, Berlin Zoo,” is one of the most probing and acute philosophical poems of our time. An entirely remarkable book.

C.K. Williams is the author of many books of poetry, including “The Singing,” which won a 2003 National Book Award, and of the memoir “Misgivings.”