Discoveries

An Ambulance Is on the Way

Stories of Men in Trouble

Jonathan Wilson

Pantheon Books: 208 pp., $21

It’s all here: the nameless ailments, the broken appliances, the suburban rage, the countless minutes and the guilty hours -- every regret, every space-out and even a few instances of misplaced desire.

How does Jonathan Wilson do it in “An Ambulance Is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble,” a collection of a mere 11 short tales? The way Denis Johnson did it, the way Jayne Anne Phillips did it (but funnier), the way David Foster Wallace did it (but deeper).

The guy has a knack for shorthand scene-setting. “A woman with a basket of plums on her head dips to offer us her merchandise, the bruised, split ripeness of the fruit, the whole sensualsexualviolent fiasco of the place,” he writes of a street in Jerusalem, “plums and snow and yelling fundamentalists.”

His characters are men with broken body parts who are on the brink of hospitalization and who watch their lives “in a state of interested awkwardness, which is familiar to all who live in the world, they can govern briefly but never fix.”

They live in “that huge convalescent home the world,” in one of those “use-your-words suburbs.”

There is the man caught between his Jewish mother and his Christian girlfriend’s biological clock, the man in a state of post-operative religiosity, the man who drinks most of the wine intended for his wife’s man-bashing consciousness-raising group -- all of them doomed to happy failure.

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The Tomb in Seville

Norman Lewis

Carroll & Graf: 160 pp., $20

Norman LEWIS has been called “the father of modern travel writing,” in part because he came of literary age in the 1930s and ‘40s, when readers were more interested in the motivations for travel, in travel as escape rather than British-style accounts of conquests or expeditions.

In the posthumously published “The Tomb in Seville,” Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene (who secretly carried his very own Communist Party card) set out for Seville to visit the tomb in which Lewis’ wife’s ancestors are buried.

On the way, they stop in Madrid on the eve of the October 1934 revolution. The two young tourists are forced to walk through the streets with their hands in the air.

Eugene is thrilled to be at the center of the action. Lewis, on the other hand, is happier wandering in the forests or luxuriating in the sunny nonchalance of the Portuguese countryside.

It is in these landscapes that Lewis shines: His writing has a Hudson River quality -- landscapes in which all of creation buzzes and whirrs, and some inexplicable source of light bathes the ferns.

In Andalusia, Lewis’ writing takes on the almost funny, hysterical desperation of a Luis Bunuel film -- blind people fighting in the streets, villages flattened by poverty.

Lewis died in 2003 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that, at its best, is a delightful cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Henry James.

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Tamburlaine Must Die

A Novel

Louise Welsh

Canongate: 152 pp., $18.95

The year is 1593, and playwright Christopher Marlowe is avoiding plague-ridden London by visiting his patron’s country estate. Suddenly, he is summoned by Queen Elizabeth I, whose privy council has called Marlowe’s loyalty to queen and country into question.

Someone has been spreading evil rumors about him; in clues and notes left around town, Marlowe recognizes his own style and the style of his famously ruthless character Tamburlaine (“a savage Scythian shepherd-made-king”), who has somehow come alive and escaped from the play, and is terrifying the people of London.

Louise Welsh’s vivid portrait of the beautiful, passionate, ever-witty Marlowe is the centerpiece of her new novel, “Tamburlaine Must Die.”

Her fictional explanation of Marlowe’s mysterious death makes this book a phantasmagoric Elizabethan thriller.