FICTION & POETRY

Away

By Amy Bloom

Random House

A refugee from the Russian pogroms crosses North America in the 1920s in search of her lost daughter in a novel that combines an immigrant’s tale with the road novel, the love story and the ghost story, rich in “finely wrought prose, vivid characters, delectable details.”

--

Bridge of Sighs

By Richard Russo

Alfred A. Knopf

In this “tapestry of a novel,” an aging painter, kidnapped and stashed in a trunk as a child, grapples with “a cosmography of good and evil” in an upstate New York town, where a bridge spans a river that runs red with toxic chemicals from a local tannery.

--

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By Junot Diaz

Riverhead

A “panoramic . . . aching personal tale” of a nerdy sci-fi writer whose fantasies about attracting girls give way to the tale of his mother’s rape -- and lots more -- in the Dominican Republic, her flight to Paterson, N.J., and her children’s struggle to understand the nature of love.

--

Cheating at Canasta: Stories

By William Trevor

Viking

This collection captures in telling detail “how serious, noble, painful and happy” human life is. In Trevor’s stories, the “feelings of children matter, the regrets of husbands, the loneliness of women. Every story has its victim, but the crime is forgotten somewhere along the line because, well, we are only human.”

--

The Book of Psalms

Translated by Robert Alter

W.W. Norton

A fresh look at this foundational text of Western culture reveals the Psalms as poems “made by human hands and breath.” Alter’s translation offers “a sense of an abrupt, muscular intensity; he restores to the Psalms a kind of strangeness that emanates from an encounter with a culture we recognize yet is distinctly alien to us, far removed in time and frame of mind.”

--

Collected Stories

By Leonard Michaels

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The late author’s collected short fiction is “hypnotizing” in the “thrumming violence that occupies a space so close to love.” These stories, including some never previously published, are “the written equivalent of an after-image: what comes back, what haunts, how close to the truth you can get, no matter how ugly . . . those cadences that continue to sound within you.”

--

The Empress of Weehawken

By Irene Dische

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

A “rollicking tour” of the inner and outer lives of a Christian refugee from Hitler’s Germany who brings her “high-toned . . . ideals and snobbery” to the “less civilized” New Jersey suburbs, where “every moment is filled with conflict between her expectations and reality.” In a voice that is “pure as a bell,” the author shows “how character is inherited yet subtly altered over the generations.”

--

Falling Man

By Don DeLillo

Scribner

Don DeLillo is “our great barometer, fascinated, from his earliest novels on, by the ominous present impinging on the future, by conspiracy, by collective angst.” This “gripping, haunting ensemble piece” looks at the consequences for a New York City family of the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Exploring the question of how we live now, the novel is “full of the sensation of terrifying forces thrust inward and capped.”

--

Fieldwork

By Mischa Berlinski

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

In Berlinski’s affecting and atmospheric first novel, a young journalist traveling in Thailand, obsessed with the story of a murder committed by a gifted anthropologist, plunges into the world of missionaries and tribesmen and encounters a tragic misunderstanding.

--

Five Skies

By Ron Carlson

Viking

This novel -- Carlson’s first in 30 years -- revolves around three damaged souls (an aging rancher, a guilt-ridden engineer and a runaway teenager) who come together one summer to build a stunt motorcycle ramp in a gorge in southern Idaho. A stirring exploration of the way men relate (or don’t) to one another, set against the stark and unforgiving landscape of the rural West.

--

The Gathering

By Anne Enright

Black Cat/Grove Press

A young Irishwoman copes with the suicide of her alcoholic older brother and its effects on her family, in Enright’s fourth novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize.

--

Jamestown

By Matthew Sharpe

Soft Skull Press

In this “violent, mordantly hilarious” post-apocalyptic novel, refugees from a ruined Manhattan venture down I-95 to the 400-year-old site of the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

--

The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007

By Albert Goldbarth

Graywolf Press

Goldbarth is one of our most ambitious and remarkable poets, and this generous collection gathers more than 125 of his pieces, ranging from the mythic to the autobiographical, to get at the struggles and small satisfactions of contemporary life.

--

Like You’d Understand, Anyway: Stories

By Jim Shepard

Alfred A. Knopf

These stories, set in such diverse places as 1980s Chernobyl, the 19th century Australian outback and Earth orbit, are “an eclectic overview of human experience . . . on both epic and intimate scales.” The wildly inventive Shepard blurs the line between literature and pop culture.

--

Lost City Radio

By Daniel Alarcon

HarperCollins

In an anonymous South American country, a “nation at the edge of the world” and emerging from civil war, a radio station reconnects callers with their missing loved ones. This debut novel has “the portentous chill of fable.”

--

The Ministry of Special Cases

By Nathan Englander

Alfred A. Knopf

In 1976, a Jewish couple in Buenos Aires search for their son, who has become one of los Desaparecidos -- “the disappeared” -- in Argentina’s Dirty War. Englander’s “mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory” is a family drama “layered with agonized and often comical filial connections that are stretched to the snapping point by terrible circumstance.”

--

My Body: New and Selected Poems

By Joan Larkin

Hanging Loose Press

For nearly 40 years, Larkin has used her own experience for material, writing about her sexuality, her battles with alcoholism and her familial relationships with an eye that’s clear and sharp. This book gathers work from her previous three collections as well as new material to make a case for her as a poet of the examined life.

--

Red Rover

By Deirdre McNamer

Viking

The lives of two Montana brothers who rode the prairie as boys diverge in World War II. On their return from war, the older, who had been a spy in Argentina, dies under mysterious circumstances. McNamer’s writing “has a unique, aboriginal rhythm. . . . [I]t’s thrilling to find a writer you can hang your hat on.”

--

Remainder

By Tom McCarthy

Vintage

A man who has lost his memory after an accident sets about re-creating his life in unsettling ways. McCarthy “urges us to question what reality is -- and has become -- by virtue of our seeming ability to manipulate any facet of our lives.”

--

The Savage Detectives

By Roberto Bolano

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

In this vividly ironic work by the late Chilean-born novelist, two poets at the heart of a radical literary movement in 1970s Mexico City travel the globe in search of an aging writer. The novel “becomes nothing less than a broad portrait of the Hispanic diaspora, spreading from Central and South America to Israel, Europe, Africa and every place in between, from the late 1960s through the 1990s.”

--

The Shadow Catcher

By Marianne Wiggins

Simon & Schuster

The life of early 20th century photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, dovetailed with that of a contemporary novelist named Marianne Wiggins. Wiggins, “one of our most adventuresome and enterprising novelists,” has “an idea to explore as well as a story to tell, and she moves gracefully between the two, never allowing her speculations about the idea to contaminate the authority with which she depicts her characters.”

--

Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money

By Rebecca Curtis

HarperPerennial

In this bleak, often funny debut story collection, characters -- female, most often -- yearn for something more than their lives provide. The protagonists’ “dilemma -- feeling ownership of a landscape that the wealthy somehow lay greater claim to -- adds tension to stories filled with gorgeous and telling detail.”

--

Varieties of Disturbance: Stories

By Lydia Davis

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The latest story collection from Davis “poses a series of word problems for the existentially challenged.” With loop-the-loop plots and a shrewd wit, she peers deeply into the absurdist margins of everyday life. Her stories, “for all their humor, can be irrationally terrifying, like beautifully made little boxes in which your thumbs have somehow become trapped.”

--

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

By Michael Chabon

HarperCollins

Chabon’s first major novel since “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” is an alternative-history murder mystery set in a fictional Jewish state that was set up in Alaska as “safe zone” for European Jews after World War II. Playful, exuberant and full of telling details, it’s a reminder that fiction is an art of possibility, in which we have the opportunity to reimagine the world.

--

Zeroville

By Steve Erickson

Europa Editions

In Erickson’s eighth novel, a young filmmaker finds a home -- and a vision -- among the outcasts of Hollywood in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. It is a darkly visionary book, yet also rooted in the specifics of its moment -- this may well be the author’s most accessible work. Erickson, who is also a film critic for Los Angeles magazine, “manages to wipe clean the presumptions typically guiding the Hollywood Novel.”