Kay Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson, and I like to imagine Dickinson and Marianne Moore reading her with sly commiseration. Unlike some poets with recognizable styles, Ryan does not write the same poem again and again, and her sharp eye is both benevolent and unflinching.

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A former neo-Nazi’s memoir describes a violent life in the white supremacist movement and his transformative experiences in prison. …more

Peter Bognanni’s first novel mixes punk rock and the wild creativity of Buckminster Fuller into a tender and believable chronicle of teen sorrow. …more

“Big American Trip addresses our insecurities as artists, lovers, and citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak.” …more

“This voice is neither howl, yowl, nor whisper, but something more like a quiet monotone, slightly ironic and yet also depressed, lonely, and compellingly vulnerable.” …more

A new volume of stories by Mavis Gallant traces the writer’s development from early stories of bewilderment and disappointment to the sharp, incisive later work of a master. …more

Ali Shaw’s novel concerns a modern-day Midas, a cold and inhospitable island, and a young woman whose body is inexorably transforming. …more

A first novel by playwright Jillian Weise tackles the moral and ethical questions surrounding both medical research and human relationships. …more

The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.

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Dreams, vignettes, hypotheticals, and poetry lay out alternate versions of Western literature’s founding epic. …more

Heidi W. Durrow’s novel is both the story of a woman learning to negotiate biracial life and that of the lone survivor of a horrible tragedy. …more

In stories that range through history, serendipity, speculation, whimsy, and horror, Daniel Olivas chronicles the lives of characters who have loved—and lost—Los Angeles. …more

Geoffrey Becker’s second novel races across the country in the company of “spiritual beings having a human experience.” …more

What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.

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The essays in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs explore the many successes and admirable qualities of their author. …more

The characters in this debut collection of short stories are soaked, tossed, drowned, and washed away by love. …more

Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the “angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere”… …more

Eric Puchner’s first novel exposes the faultlines and frustrations beneath the shining American dream. …more

Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe chronicles two “mutinous spirits” in the chaos of 1970s New York. …more

John Haskell’s novel takes readers on a metaphysical journey through the mind of a Steve Martin-impersonator impersonator. …more

Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.

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Margo Berdeshevsky’s work straddles the line between fiction and poetry. Her characters grieve, dream, punish themselves, and try to find harmony between who they are and who they might still be. …more

The Albanian, in Ornela Vorpsi’s comic novel, is someone prone to megalomania, and who has one obsession “dearer to them than death… Fornication.” …more

In a new book of essays, Terry Castle rips through literary and cultural allusions at breakneck speed, citing obscure folk musicians and cult novelists in the same breath. …more

B. H. Fairchild fuses mundane with spiritual in resolute ways, as “in the silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant,” a glorious line that would have been less so if the words “rain” and “abundant” were switched …more

Amy Bloom’s characters are glorious, endearing wrecks—vain, horny, bullheaded, and brave. They resemble everyone we’ve ever known intimately. …more

The latest memoir of the 2008 Presidential campaign is a fake book about fake events by a fake political operative. …more

Lori Ostlund masters the sadness of breakups, the empty inevitability of doors closing: “For at each turn, the people we hold close elude us.” …more

A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.

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